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EDITED BY JXUNN INGHAM . 



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PU D L I wSHE I) BT L ANCi . 8c T. AIIs^ ( 

(ftt i]mTnn*G . Citl)n^ijrapl)iTO i- prmicni . 

II 7, ,F U UTO N (ST R E LT, N . Y . 

^ 1860 



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Hail, Caledonia ! land of song and story, — 
Land of the fair, the virtuous and the brave ! 

The brightest star that sheds on thee its glory- 
Rose from the darkness of thy Burns's grave : 

That star shall be a light among the nations 
When prouder orbs have faded and grown dim. 

And hailed with pride by coming generations. 
For man yet knows not all he owes to him. 

His strains have nerved the feeble 'gainst oppression, — 

Aroused in true men's hearts a scorn of wrong, — 
Pointed the hopeless to man's sure progi-ession. 

And taught the weak to suffer and be strong. 
Lessons like these the soul of man shall cherish 

While through his heart the ardent life-blood springs : 
One burning thought, at least, can never perish — 

An honest man's above the might of kings. 



While noble souls shall glow with warm emotion, — 

While Woman loves and Genius pants for fame, — 
While Truth and Freedom claim man's deep devotion. 

True hearts shall throb responsive to his name. 
Then weep not, Scotland, though thy minstrel slumbers ; 

Still lives the spirit of his song sublime, — 
Still shall the music of his deathless numbers 

Thrill in all hearts and vibrate through all time. 

J. c. 



1 



OFFICERS AND MEMBERS 

OF THE 

BURNS CLUB 

OF THE 

CITY OF NEW YOEIv. 

J^:srXJA.I4Y 35tli, 1859. 



President, 
JOSEPH CUNNINGHAM. 

First Y ice- President. 
JOSEPH LAING. 

Second Vice-Pi^esident. 
DR. JOHN D. NORCOTT.* 

Recording Secretary. 
PJCHARD COCHRANE. 

Corresponding Secretary. 
VAIR CLIREHUGH, Je. 

Treasurer. 
ROBERT MELDRUM. 

* Since deceased. 



4 members' names. 




Members. 


Jas. Nicholson. 


David Rutherford. 


Wm. Burns. 


RoBT. Burnet. 


"W. S. Clirehugh. 


Geo. Nimmo. 


Wm. Hepburn. 


Wm. Wakefield. 


ROBT. N"eILSON. 


John A, Parks. 


Wm. Lang. 


Wm. Park. 


Chas. Burns. 


Thos. Gow. 


Edward Fisher. 


John A. McLean. 


T. C. Latto. 


RoBT. Gun. 


Edward Kearney. 


Wm. Manson. 


John Robertson. 


John R. Hunter. 


Chas. Burt. 


John McDonough. 


Wm. Robertson. 


Dr. Wm. Johnston. 


Geo. Rintoul. 


John R. Watson. 


John B. Muir. 


Frederick Hale. 


John Burt. 


Thos. Howitt. 


Jas. L. Dick. 


H. H. Dow. 


Daniel Eraser. 


Dr. Jas. Norval. 


Thos. McRae. 


Jas. Blane. 


RoBT. Donald. 


T. C. GoURLAT. 


John White. 


RoBT. McISTiE. 


John Fell. 


Wm. H. Morrison. 


W. G. COUTTS. 


Wm. Robertson. 


John W. Sumner. 


John Stewart. 


RoBT. Davidson. 


Jas. Quee. 


Wm. Inglis. 


Daniel Dove. 



PREFACE. 

^- 



The Twenty-fifth of January, 1859, was a day worthy to 
be kept in perennial remembrance. On that day, in every 
part of the civilized globe, there was accorded to the memory 
of a man of genius, and to the manly sentiments which he had 
expressed, a tribute of homage more sincere, spontaneous, and 
universal, than the world had ever before witnessed. In every 
land, the lofty and the lowly, the humble and the proud, — 
men of mighty intellect, and plain unlettered men, — met to 
honor the memory of one whose simple songs and honest, man- 
ful utterances had furnished a " touch of nature which made 
the whole world kin," — and to render the simultaneous ver- 
dict that " the man of independent mind is king of men." 
Eloquence poured forth its loftiest strains, and rough, uncul- 
tured men felt their noblest instincts stir within them, and were 
elevated and refined by the inspiration of the hour. 

And when, on that day, — in the lordly hall or the humble 
cot, — the strong proud man, the tender woman, or the lisping 



(• PREFACE. 

child, witli mingled admiration, love and pity, syllabled the 
name of Robert Burns, no doubt could linger that his name 
had become a Power in the earth never more to be forgotten, 
contemned, or ignored. The musical words of the poor peas- 
ant, glowing with the nobleness of his own soul, had borne 
their eternal truths to the heart of Humanity, there to be en- 
shrined, to operate in the history and modify the destiny of 
his race forever. 

Among the many brilliant demonstrations on that day, in 
Great Britain and America, it will not be questioned that the 
celebration by the Burns Club of JSTew York should be classed 
among those entitled to the highest consideration. The ora- 
tion delivered on the evening preceding the Anniversary, by 
one of the most eminent and popular orators of the day, was 
of itself a distinguishing feature. At the Anniversary Festi- 
val at the Astor House, one of the most illustrious poets, as 
well as one of the most respected citizens, of America, lent his 
fame and his presence to the occasion, as the honorary presid- 
ing officer; while at his side another, whose fame is identified 
with the name of Bnrns, added lustre to the gathering. The 
Pulpit, the Press, and the Bar furnished some of their ablest 
representatives ; and men eminent in every honorable position 
presented an assembly distinguished for intellectual excellence 
and high character, probably never surpassed in the city of 
'New York on any similar occasion. And in all the world on 
that day, the pervading sentiment of the occasion found no 



PREFACE. 



7 



more eloquent expression tlian that which fell upon the ears of 
those within the Astor House. This attempt, therefore, to fur- 
nish some account of a commemoration so rare and so remark- 
able, will not be regarded with surprise. 

The proceedings which are reported in the following pages, 
and the tributes of intellect and genius which are annexed, 
have been collected in this volume with the design of furnish- 
ing in a proper form a record worthy of preservation, to those 
who participated on the occasion, and to others who may de- 
sire to have combined in an appropriate setting the gems of 
eloquence which added brilliance to the commemoration. 

It is designed, also, to place copies of this memorial in the 
public libraries of the city ; and when the first Centennial 
Birth-day of Burns has receded far in the past, they may be 
found of occasional value for reference, by the curious or the 
interested. Time will increase rather than diminish the value 
of such a record. Whatever social or political revolutions 
may occur in the progress of events, it seems now not unrea- 
sonable to hope and believe that the sentiments which have 
given to Burns such influence in the hearts of his fellow-men, 
may in the future meet even a more willing and universal 
acceptance than they do to-day. And probably a hundred 
years hence his memory will be honored as ardently as now. 
And should some two or three of these little books survive 
the chance and change of a century of years, the men of that 
time, when they meet to celebrate the Second Centennial 



PREFACE. 



Birth-clay of the Bard, may rejoice to find, in the record of 
eminent men who have honored the First, some of the " few 
immortal names that were not born to die :" some who, like 
Burns, have been proved the benefactors of their race, and 
whose memories, like his, are fresh and green in the hearts of 
their fellow-men. 



Janiuary 25, 1860. 



THE 



CElSTTEISriSriAL 



BIRTH-DAY OF ROBERT BURNS 



AS CELEBRATED BY THE 



$i ikt iitg $t '^m Unit, 



PRELIMINARY PROCEEDINGS. 



FoK several months previous to the close of the year 1858, 
the Burns Club held in contemplation the approaching Centen- 
nial Anniversary, with the view of adopting such measures 
as should seem best adapted to render their celebration worthy 
the occasion, and such as would be expected of the empire 
city of America. Being also disposed to promote an appro- 
priate enthusiasm and concert of action throughout the North 
American continent, they issued, early in October, 1858, a Cir- 
cular, of which the following is a copy : 

AsTOR House, New York, October, 1858. 

The Bums Club of the City of New York being desirous of celebrating 
the approaching centennial anniversary of the Birth-day of Scotland's 
most honored Poet, Robert Burns, in a manner worthy the occasion and 
creditable to the chief city of the Western Hemisphere ; and believing 
that such celebration should, as far as possible, be united and general 
throughout the North American continent, take this method of announcing 
to kindred associations in the cities of Great Britain, the United States and 
the British Provinces, that they will be gratified to make arrangements 
with them for such co-operation as may be practicable for the purpose of 



10 BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 



giving united expression to those sentiments of reverence for the memory 
and admiration for the genius of the Poet of Humanity, which, while 
especially natural and becoming to his countrymen, find an echo and a 
sympathy in the hearts of the people of America, and of every civilized 
nation. 

It is the design of the Burns Club of New York to celebrate the occa- 
sion by a Festival Dinner at the Astor House ; by telegraphic exchanges 
with the princiijal cities of Scotland and other parts of Great Britain, if 
practicable ; and by such other ceremonies as may be deemed appropriate 
and judicious. The participation and cn-operation of the Clubs of this 
country and the Canadas, and also of such other associations as may feel 
an interest in the cocasion, are earnestly desired, either by written com- 
munication, telegraphic dispatches, or delegations, the jireliminaries of 
which may be arranged by previous correspondence. Any suggestions 
which may tend to render the demonstration more general, united and 
effective, Avill be cordially entertained. 

Communications with reference to the proposed arrangements may be 
addressed to Vair Clirehugh, Corresponding Secretary of the Burns Club 
of the city of New York, at the Astor House. 

The foregoing Circular, signed by the proper officers, was 
extensively distributed in the principal cities of the United 
States, the Canadas, and Great Britain. The Press of this city 
and country, generally, aided very cordially in giving publicity 
to the design expressed therein : in many instances publishing 
the circular entire, and referring to it editorially. Several of 
the leading newspapers of London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and 
other places in Great Britain, also accorded to it special and 
favorable notice. There is reason to believe that the extensive 
distribution of this circular contributed in a large degree to the 
brilliant general result on the day of the Anniversary. Com- 
munications were received from all parts of the United States, 
from Great Britain and elsewhere, giving evidence that in many 
instances it had suggested a celebration of the day where none 
had been contemplated, and stimulated enthusiasm where prepa- 
rations had been made. 

[It is proper to remark, that at the time the circular was 



PRELIMINARY PROCEEDINGS. 



11 



issued, the immediate practical operation and success of the 
great Atlantic Telegraph was generally anticipated. And it 
would indeed have been a peculiarly fitting and crowning 
consummation of the celebration, if those who were assembled 
in the Old World and the New, to honor the memor}^ of 
KoBEET Burns, could on that day have been united, as it were, 
by actual contact.] 

Anions: other arraiio-ements made bv the Burns Club for 
the celebration of the Centennial Anniversary, invitations were 
issued, at the suggestion of the presiding oflScers, to Mr. "William 
CuLLEN Bryant and Mr. Edward M. Archibald, to occupy 
the honorary positions of Chairman and Croupier, at the 
Festival at the Astor House, which invitations were courte- 
ously accepted by those gentlemen. It was also decided 
that an oration by some able and distinguished man would 
be an appropriate and eiFective feature. Application was 
accordingly made, for this purpose, to Bev. Henry Ward 
Beecher ; and that gentleman having acceded to the propo- 
sition, the large hall of the Cooper Institute was engaged for 
the evening of Monday, Jan. "24, 1859. The result exceeded 
all anticipation. Long before the hour appointed, on the even- 
ing named, an eager crowd had assembled ; and upon the 
opening of the doors the hall w^as filled in every part, every 
seat in the auditorium and upon the platform being occupied. 

The JSf. Y. Herald of Jan. 25, 1859, speaking of this assem- 
bly, says: "The doors of the Institute were thrown open to 
the public at seven o'clock, and in half an hour after, every 
available seat in the auditorium was occupied, as well as the 
special seats prepared on the platform. Among the audience 
we noticed some of our most prominent and intellectual cit- 
izens." 

The Scottish American Journal of Jan. 29, 1859, in intro- 



12 BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 

ducing its report of the oration, remarked : "There were three 
thousand people present, and among the audience were several 
of the most prominent citizens of Kew York. Although the 
hour for the commencement of the lecture was eight o'clock, 
between six and seven the doors were besieged by large num- 
bers of ladies and gentlemen eager to gain admission. The 
lecturer met with a very enthusiastic reception, and through- 
out the course of his address, which occupied an hour and a 
quarter in delivery, was warmly applauded." 

The President of the Club introduced Mr. Beecher to the 
audience, and acknowledged the courtesy of the " Societ}^ of 
Mechanics and Tradesmen," who had kindly conceded to the 
Burns Club their right to the use of the Cooper Institute for 
that evening. Mr. Beecher then proceeded to deliver the 
address which will be found in the ensuing pages. 



ir^t i^ti^t 



RTGV. HENRY ^WATIJD BEKCHER. 



I COME upon your invitation, gentlemen of the Burns Chib, 
friends and fellow-citizens, to celebrate with one half of the 
civilized world, and with the whole world of letters, the birth 
of a farmer's boy, who became a ploughman, a flax-dresser, an 
exciseman and ganger, and who was reputed also to have 
become a poet. One hundred years ago, January 25th, 1759, 
Agnes Brown Burness gave to the world her son, Robert 
Burns. The father and the mother were Scotch. The son 
only took Scotland on his way into the whole world. While 
we allow Scotchmen a suitable national pride in their chief 
poet, we cannot allow the world to be robbed of their right 
and interest in Burns. And yet there never was born to that 
land, so fertile in men, a truer Scotchman ; and it is the pecu- 
liar admiration and glory of the man, that in spite of obscu- 
rity, bred to all the local influences, Scotch in bone, in muscle, 
in culture, and in dialect, he rose higher than the special and 
national, and achieved his glory in those elements which unite 
mankind, and make all nations of one blood. While men of 
science are groping about the signs of external man, and 
debating the origin and unity of races, a poet strikes the fun- 
damental chords, and all races, peoples, and tongues hear, un- 
derstand, and agree ; so that the poet is, after all, the true 
ethnologist. The human heart is his harp, and he who knows 



14 BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 

how to toncli tliat with skill, belongs to no country, can be 
shut in by no language, nor sequestered by any age. He be- 
longs to the world and to the race. 

The father of Burns, William Burness — the poet contracted 
the name when he published his first volume — was a genuine 
man in his way. He had a head, and a heart, and a pair of 
hands, all of which were kept exceedingly busy in prolonging 
a desperate fight for life and comfort. He was a man of stern 
probity, of the deepest religious convictions, and of an indom- 
itable will. He expected much of all his family, but was 
sterner with himself than with any other. His only amuse- 
ment was speculative theology, but that did not injure his 
morals, for he was a man of scrupulous integrity to the last — 
clean to the very fountain of honor ; yet was irascible, and 
when unduly thwarted, violent in temper. He held up his 
head like a brave swimmer in a rough sea, until the waves 
fairly beat him down. William Burness never prospered. 
His son says of him ; " Stubborn, ungainly integrity, and 
headlong, ungovernable irascibility, are disqualifying circum- 
stances in the path of fortune." It is not the rigor of integ- 
rity which stands in any man's way. It is the indiscriminate 
stifii'ening of everything by the rigor of pride saturated with 
conscience ; for God has built the human form to combine the 
utmost stiflfness with the utmost litheness. There are bones 
for stiffness, and there are joints for limberness. So with the 
character. It is to be built upon the sternest elements of truth 
and justice, but somewhere there must be litheness and plia- 
bleness. If there are no joints in the character, no supple 
motion, and if the tastes, opinions and prejudices, likes and 
dislikes, are all solidified into a multiplex conscience, no man 
can get along in life. It was a little too much of this ossifica- 
tion which made William Burness too stilf to fight well. 



ORATIOISr. 



15 



Some parents seem to be the mere antecedents of their chil- 
dren. As ships sometimes are built far up the stream where 
timber abounds and only float down and out of the estuary, so 
it would seem of some men that they owe their natures to their 
grand-parents or some body far up the stream of generations. 
Burns' father possessed very much the same character as his 
son. The same moral honesty, the same pride, the same vio- 
lence of feeling, the same penetration of men, the same breadth 
of understanding, the same impatience of restraint from without, 
the same unfitness for thriving in worldly matters, the same 
longing for wealth, for its independence, and contempt for the 
means of getting wealth, belonged to the father and the more 
illustrious son. Only, besides the father, Robert Burns carried 
in him a great deal of the mother ; and if he had carried more 
he would have been better, for the father is the bush and the 
mother is the blossom, and the fruit germ is always in or 
under the blossom. Agnes Brown was a woman of humble 
birth, that is, she was born as every body else is born. It will 
not do to say " king's babe and beggar's brat." Being born 
is a very humble business at any rate, and there is very little 
difl:erence in crying, in sleeping, in eating, for in the cradled 
unconsciousness of babes the world over, there is very much 
of a sameness. It is very plain that she was effectually born, 
however. It is thought by some that men have lived in a world 
before this and that they are set out a second time here — though 
it would be difficult to imagine in many cases what they grew 
in, if this was the second growth, yet Agnes Brown was an 
exception ; she brought along with her from that dim source of 
human life, wherever or whatever it was, the seed of many rare 
and precious faculties. Central and strong was her heart. It 
had that deep nature which religion always gives. It is faith 
in the invisible and in the infinite that rolls out the sea into an 



16 BUENS CENTENNIAL CELEBEATION. 



unhedged ocean and makes the thought long and deep. Any 
nature without depth of moral feeling is but a river pilot steer- 
ing a light craft near the river banks, and thumping along at 
every turn upon the sand or mod. As the stream of her life 
ran far above the bottom, it did not carry many ripples upon 
its surface. She was calm, gentle, and of a heavenly temper. 
She was a good house-keeper, which is a very brave and noble 
thing in woman, and a thing often requiring more mind and 
tact than to govern a nation, as nations are governed. But 
while she wronght and arranged, she chatted and snng, for 
Burns' mother was the mother of Burns' poetry. Her songs 
and ballads were in great store and of a moral aim. The song 
which she loved most to sing and Burns most loved to hear, 
was " The Life and Age of Man," comparing the periods of 
human life to the months of the year ; and Burns says of his 
grand-uncle that during many years of his blindness he had no 
greater enjoyment than that of crying, while his mother sang 
that ballad to him. Ah, how many sweet sounds there are in 
this world, how many sounds of air and water, how many songs 
of birds and sounds of musical instruments ; but when all is 
said, neither has man invented any musical instrument, nor has 
nature in all her choir and orchestra any thing which for sweet- 
ness is like a mother's voice singing through the house, while 
she labors — songs, hymns, and ballads — the children sleep, 
dream of angels, and awake and say " Mother !" With such a 
father and such a mother. Burns could not help himself. Of 
course he must be an Apollo's arrow with such a mother for a 
bow, and with such a father for a string ; and the bow abides 
in its strength, and the string is uncut, and the arrow still flies, 
and sounds in flying. The father of Burns had just built, and 
poorly built, a clay cottage on the banks of the Doon, county 
of Ayr, and scarcely had the poet learned to live, that is, to 



ORATION. 



17 



cry, before a rnde storm beat down the tenement. That storm 
never spent itself, but bleAv after him all his life long. He was 
wont, in the days of his trouble, with gloomy playfulness, to 
attribute the violence of his passions to the tempest -which 
ushered himself into the woi-ld ; and these passions certainly 
succeeded in blowing down the clay-bnilt tenement in which he 
himself dwelt. As a child we have little record of him except 
his own reminiscences in his various letters. He Avas not pre- 
cocious. His earlier years seem to have been purely receptive. 
He was unconsciously receiving his education. It was a good 
education. There was no Latin nor Greek in it ; but as he did 
not intend to sing in those tongues, there was no special reason 
in his case for learning them. They were dead languages ; he 
was a living man — a living singer. His father and mother 
taught him morals and religion. An old servant, Jenny Wil- 
son, took charge of his imagination, fired and fed it by such a 
collection of tales and songs concerning devils, fairies, brownies, 
spiinkies, warlocks, w^raiths, apparitions, cantraps, giants, en- 
chanted towers, dragons, and other trumpery, as I suppose no 
poet had ever received before or since. But Burns' imagination 
was not superstitious, notwithstanding such a beginning ; it was 
eminently simple, natural, and transparent ; so that these tales 
only stimulated but did not subdue, nor even educate his ima- 
gination. They fell upon his young fancy as coarse fertilizers 
upon the farmer's field, which enter in the earth black and 
noisome, but re-appear as flowers, seeds, and fruit. Kature was 
also at work in his education. I mean the physical world 
without him held up to him clouds or cloudless heavens, morn- 
ing and evening, rivers, thickets, rocks and ravines, birds, 
flowers, and harvest-fields, and whatever else comes into the 
ear-gate or the eye-gate. Some natures gain nothing from this 
great school-master, Nature. They are like dogs in Raphael's 
3 



18 BUKXS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 

Studio, or in Michael Angelo's house; the}" get meat there, but 
never learn to paint or to carve. But other men are sensitive 
to all that nature does, as if God stood visibly before them and 
showed his hand while drawing forms and laying on the colors ; 
and Burns was one of these. 

But great pains was taken with 3'oung Burns to give him 
all the advantage of the school learning that the times, the 
neighborhood, and his parents' scanty means could supply. 
A Scotch farmer's house is itself no mean school. There is 
learned at least a deal of local history and legendary lore 
which books are not apt to contain. There the child is taught 
to ponder and dispute in speculative theology — a practice 
which in education is of wonderful power. Whatever we may 
think of the truth or the wisdom of the elements of specu- 
lative theology, no man can be from his childhood tauglit to 
go forth in these wide-reaching views of divine government 
and human destiny, without having a deej) place in his 
nature touched ; and no man can mount to the great spec- 
ulations of free will and divine decrees, and do battle with 
them without gaining both dialectic skill and some arousing 
of the imagination. But though Burns declined from the rigid 
faith of the kirk, and leaned towards new lights, yet he had 
breathed an atmosphere which affected his mind to the end. 
In succession, he went to school to Mr. Campbell — (I mention 
the names of these men, who are great, because of their con- 
nection with him) — and afterwards to Mr. Murdock in the 
town of Ayr. At nineteen he spent a short time at school 
at Kirkeswold, where he learned mensuration, engineering, and 
what not. In the meantime Burns had read Bunyan, who if 
once read will be remembered forever. He says — " The idea 
I formed of modern manners and literature and criticism, I got 
from the Spectator. These with Pope's works, which could 



ORATION. 



19 



add nothing to Burns' only as an aid in smoothing his 
style, some plays in Shakspeare, Dickson on Agriculture, 
Locke on the Understanding, (and a better one was never 
put on,) — Stackhonse's History of the Bible, Boyle's Lec- 
tures, Allan Ramsay's works, Taylor's Scriptural History of 
Original Sin, a Select Collection of English Songs, and Har- 
vey's Meditations, formed the whole of my readings." These 
books were well enough, for in sooth neither schoolmaster nor 
books made Robert Burns. He did not derive his tempestuous 
nature from books. His tender love, his sympathy, his per- 
sonal relationship to whatever in nature was beautiful, his 
penetration of human life, his mournful melancholy, his love 
of man, of liberty, of power, and grandeur, — the roots of Burns' 
works, you shall not find in any of these books. They are 
good books. It is the reader who makes a good book. They 
were great books when Burns read them ; but you shall not 
find his teachers there. It was the created and unwritten 
book of God that taught Robert Burns. Let us look at him at 
fourteen. He was a coarse, awkward, graceless, lubberly boy ; 
of a silent way, not given to mirth, not quick, and utterly 
unlike a poet. But he knew how to work. As early as four- 
teen he became skillful as a ploughman, and at fifteen he was 
the head workman on his father's farm. Let it be said here 
that Burns was never a lazy, shiftless man, who took to poetry 
as a fair excuse for neglecting hard work. No man ever 
worked more patiently or uncomplainingly than did he ; and 
though for years he fought desperately against discouragement 
on his father's farm, when he afterwards became a farmer for 
himself, he never shrank from toil — the rudest, coarsest, and 
most uncongenial to his poetic temperament. 

But we must not anticipate. Burns is now twenty ; but 
his hand is on the harp. His life is fairly begun — the sad life 



20 BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 



of a glorious man full of noble impulses stumbling in a rongh 
way, full of the most congenial and tender affections, grasp- 
ing mankind by the heart, and aiming in all his essential 
works to crown his human life with goodness. But before we 
venture upon that career of mingled good and ill, we must stop 
and ask what Burns was — for there are some who press upon 
him vehemently with the sins of his life, and some who as 
rashly defend them at the expense of good morals. 

That he violated his own moral sense, his own solemn and 
bitter words do show. Difficult indeed is it to equal the 
awful solemnity of Burns' bitter words. He was liis own 
Biiadamanthns. He carried conviviality to excess, violated 
his own principles of virtue, and grafted license upon love. 

Burns is not helped when we denj' these mournful facts of 
his sad life, or when we palliate them to a degree which shall 
make them less guilty in a poet than in every man. Let them 
stand if they are facts. We must recognize them. In draw- 
ing his character, while we give it all the lights, we must not 
shrink from the fidelity of the shadows also. But although 
immoralities are never to be excused by what a man is not, 
yet what a man is will determine the severity and leniency of 
our condemnation. How a ship behaves upon the sea, depends 
not alone upon the skill of those who manage her, but also 
upon the way in which it was built. How was Burns built? 
Burns was endowed wi'h a masculine understanding, clear and 
penetrating, that saw things by their whole, intuitively, and 
not in detail. His mind was logical in thought, not in things. 
He was wiser as a thinker than as an actor, for the part of the 
mind, which is the ground of the instinct which gives manage- 
ment, tact, and thrift in the common things of life, was not 
eminent in him. He inherited a pride, which wrought in him 
a most intense sense of personality, which gave him a very 



ORATION. 



21 



high ideal of manliness, which inspired an undying longing 
for a well-earned glory, which made him suspicious of all 
above him, and a patron and protector of all below him — a 
pride which, acting in one way, sustained him under a load of 
ill-success, and which, turning inward, ate his heart out, be- 
cause he conld not rise. I know not from which parent he 
took his heart; from botli of them, I think. He was generous, 
like his father, who was more kind to others than to himself. 
He had the depth and tenderness of his mother's heart, but 
not her calmness and evenness. Her heart lay tranquil, like 
one of the sweet lakes of Scotland. His beat as the ocean 
beats and surges on the western shore of Scotland. It has 
been the fashion to speak of Burns as having a liglit fancy, 
easily kindled by the glance of beauty, and as easily extin- 
guished. Nothino- can be more nntrne. JSTo heart was ever 
truer or more enduring in its affections. He never loved to 
cast off; but each love was but another link, not always 
golden, of that long chain of which his heart was the immo- 
vable staple. He loved men, he loved animals, and whatever 
grew, if it only grew in Scotland. His loving nature was won- 
derful. No man can form any estimate of either the good or 
bad that was in him, who does not study Burns' heart, whose 
tides were as deep as the ocean's, and sometimes as tempestu- 
ous. That he was more susceptible to women than men is not 
strange. The same thing has happened before. And though 
he best loved woman, woman was not the only subject of his 
affection. In his better moods, universal being circled into 
his affections. His nature overspread universal human life, 
as the great arch overspreads the world with benign brightness 
by day, and drops down upon it mute dews by night. And 
to this we must add that peculiar kind of emotion, which you 
may call fancy, imagination, or poetic vision — that divine 



22 BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 

element of the sonl which teaches it to see the soul of things, 
and not their material bodies, which clothes everything it looks 
upon with beauty and grace, which works with sounds, forms, 
and movements, and evolves a subtle grace in them all. The 
soul that has this divine element is as a di^^ine wardrobe ; the 
eye, ear, and mind are almoners going forth and clothing all 
things with a radiant apparel. 

Besides these faculties, there were two other elements which 
largely influenced Bui-ns' life and determined his character. 
The first is his hereditary taint of melancholy. Tlie other 
was his temperament. From his earliest life, and in all his 
poems, we see that dark and desponding tone which so won- 
derfully contrasts with other salient traits of his character. 
At times it seems as if the great world of despondency swung 
round between liim and the sun, and he lay in fearful eclipse, 
hopeless, gloomy, wretched, and tormented. Had his life been 
successful, it may be believed that with vigorous health, and 
with praise which would gratify his pride, and with full op- 
portunity to put forth his unvexed powers, he would have 
risen above this malady. But strong in youth, it grew stronger 
when evil habits broke his constitution and povertj^ was pinch- 
ing him with want more and more. And his own moral na- 
ture adding remorse to despondency, this natural hypochondria 
became almost a fatal malady. Nor is it less important that 
we should consider his temperament, for on that depends 
much of the credit which some men have both for prudence 
and self-control, and the reverse. We believe that later phy- 
siologists agree in this, that in the human system there is a 
portion of the nervous matter, whose function is to produce 
general sensibility without regard to the special faculties of 
the mind. Thus, a sound of music falling upon two ears, fills 
one with the most thrilling sensibility, while the other receives 



ORATION. 



23 



it calmly ; not that the musical faculty is more acute in one 
than the other, but tliat the whole nervous system receives 
more readily. This fact becomes more apparent in morbid 
states of health. The sounds M'hicli are of no consequence at 
other times fill the whole mind with excessive emotion ; so that 
in estimating the power of feeling in any man, we must look 
to the development and combination of the separate faculties 
of mind in their normal creative power, and then next to the 
general sensibility of the whole nervous system, under the 
influence of which the special faculties are attempered. Some 
men with strong minds and hearts have a low temperament 
and are deficient in general sensibility. Their feelings are 
gradually worked up ; they have an equable nature ; they 
heat as iron heats. Some men heat as powder heats ; that is, 
a touch and explosion. It is not a trouble to some men to 
maintain an equable, temperate medium ; they are by nature 
cool, unimpassioned, and unexcitable. The sins of such men 
are usually the sins that collect upon the not-doing side of life, 
moth, mildew, mold, mistletoe, rust. But such men are unfit 
judges for those who have imperious sensibilities. Men who 
hear thunder as if it were the hand of a friend knocking at 
the door are not fit to judge of men in whose ear the same 
hand knocking at the door sounds like thunder. Robert Burns 
was eminently a man who had this excessive sensibility. He 
overflowed witli strength of feeling. His capacity for gen- 
erating sensibility was prodigious. His one nature carried 
enough for twenty common men of mere force of feeling. He 
never trickled drop by drop prudentially, but he gushed. He 
never ran a slender thread of silv^er water ; he came down, 
booming, all broad, like one of his own streams, when a 
shower has touched and broken upon the mountain ; and there 
never was any proportion between the cause and the efiect : 



24 BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 

a mouse, a flower, a hare had him in their power whatever 
time his heart was opened. The daisy wliich went under when 
he ploughed was not so much subjected to the iron plough- 
share as he was to the toucli of the daisy's modest look. All 
the powers of his nature were subjected to this same sudden 
overflow. He thought as dragoons charge. He felt life as 
prairies feel autumnal fires, with their leaping flames outrun- 
ning the fleetest deer and all before them, and leaving, alas, 
too often ashes and smoke behind them. He sufl'ered as if 
fiends possessed him, and enjoyed as if angels carried him in 
their bosom. There he stands, like the mountains of his own 
land — often capped with storms, oftener shrouded with mists, 
and scarred with ravines ; often thundering with the sound of 
rushing waters which dashed down the valley, tearing up 
roads and sweeping away bridges. But there, also, birds 
brooded and sung; sweet flowers found foot-room ; pure lakes 
and rock-bound brooks looked silently up to God ; the spice- 
bush, and vines purple with berries, and grass, and moaning 
pines and wind-waved larches — these all held fellowship — the 
stern and the gentle, the rugged and the beautiful, the pure 
and the turbid, the inassive, and the sweetest, tenderest little- 
ness of beaut}^ ! Strange fellowship of opposition in the one 
man ! The world has never seen his like ! 

I^ow, our problem is— how was this very sensitive creature — 
proud, loving, ambitious, yearning, ringing with every imagina- 
tion, with a head better for thought than for things, with a heart 
that every body could kindle and nobody put out — how was he 
to make his way upM^ards in life, from poverty and wretched- 
ness into large success ? It is not the question, how shall a man 
carry a small cup half full without spilling, but hovv shall a 
man carry a great cup brimfull, over a rough road, and in a 
stormy night, without spilling? It is not, how well a machine 



ORATION. 



25 



can raise just steam enough to get along ; but how an engine 
shall get along that makes more steam than it can overwork or 
cast off, trembling with inward intensit}^ as it runs with open 
throttle and open furnace doors, singing at every seam and 
hissing at every rivet ? The question we propound to you, is 
not what is right, what is duty — all are agreed as to that — but 
what shall this Kobert Burns do 'i With that natuie of his, 
compounded of such astonishing opposites — with the profound- 
est melancholy, and a sociability varying from a smile to roaring 
revelry — with an overflowing heart of kindness and love, and a 
pride as high and stern as the lordliest monarch on his throne — 
with an understanding so clear and practical that no shams or 
cant could for a moment deceive or mystify it — with an ima- 
gination so strong and transparent that it gave another nature 
than its own to every thing, and almost every person — with an 
honor and conscience so high that he would sooner have died 
than spoken a falsehood or broken a plighted word ; and with 
such a fancy, that all things were magnified and distorted — his 
friends were angels and his enemies devils; homely faces, hand- 
some; simple and common natures, divine; good men, hideous ; 
and upright men, wicked ; with such a keen relish for life, that 
he thrilled all his companions with merriment, as a drum wakes 
a camp, and yet despising the world, and walking above 
men, as shadows — yearning for immortality ! It is one of the 
strangest, the richest, and most remarkable of human histories 
the world has ever recorded. 

Gilbert, the eldest brother, the plain honest brother; Robert, 
the wonderfully compounded man, w^ere at school togetlier. 
Robert was the dunce, Gilbert was the merry and witty one ; 
Robert was as little known to himself as to others. One thing 
was plain ; he was no sentimental laggard. His father had a 
hard farm and a desperate strife for a livelihood. Robert made 



26 BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 



at fortune with a resolution, industry and patience which would 
have conquered, if it could have been done by fine furrows 
and the handsome cast of the hand in sowing seed. At the 
age of thirteen, he assisted in all the labors of the farm. At 
fourteen, he feared no competitor with scythe, sickle or plough. 
At fifteen, he was the principal laborer on the farm ; and at this 
age he would appear to have had the very stuff, out of which 
to have made a plodding yeoman. He speaks of his sufferings, 
and of his doom as the tramp and moil of a galley-slave. In 
this way, and all this time, he Avas seizing every thing in his 
way, and pushing in every direction, studying all the nicer 
shades of the language, a critic as he styles himself, in verbs 
and substantives. In his labors he carried with him a book of 
National Songs. He pored over these Scotch ballads, every 
word of which was to him like the voice of a spirit, calling 
him by name. Next Burns goes to school at Kirkeswald to 
learn surveying. He is nineteen ; he is unfolding and with 
very little to help him, and with no one to understand him. 
He is full of all manner of strange things of a most contrary 
description, but all alike in being strong and impetuous. Here 
his social nature unfolds, and his intuitive sense of character 
displays itself. He learns to read men, and a yet more dan- 
gerous literature, for his studies were all stopped short by fall- 
ing in love with a damsel living next door. He went out to 
take an observation of the sun, saw her, and stopped. He goes 
home, hungering for letters and improving his style by every 
diligence, and opening correspondence w^th every man who 
could write a creditable letter. His soul was struggling and it 
had no helper. Again, he is at home upon his father's farm, at 
Lockley. He is twenty 3'ears of age, and reading Mackenzie 
and Sterne, both sentimentalists ; one poor and feeble, and the 
other strong and evil. That great nature, all alive, had no 



ORATION. 



27 



legitimate channel yet. No man said to liim, "God sent you, 
Burns, into life to be a poet;" but every man said to him, 
" Burns, you are born to be a farmer." Burns thought so too. 
He tried to be one. All his understanding, conscience and filial 
piety were forcing him into a kind of life, which was both 
uncongenial and unnatural. Is it surprising that nature, denied 
in her highest endowments, should re-act somewhere, and that 
Burns, who in his social life possessed a power of conversation 
which gave him superiority to all about him, should sometimes 
overflow with revelry ? 

But affairs were dark at Lockley. The farm will do better 
with flax, and Robert goes to Irvine to learn flax dressing, while 
his father and Gilbert remain at home to raise the crop. He is 
twenty-two years of age, with a soul fully awake, and all his 
powers beating in hitn for some natural exercise ; his poetry, 
his love, his rugged patriotism, his philosophic meditations, and 
his rare and exquisite sensibility for natural beauty — are all set 
down to break flax and hatchel it. This is good work for a 
poet. Why, yes, poets, artists, and geniuses can do any thing? 
if they only know that they are artists, poets, and geniuses ; 
and that a homely tool is the mere means by which they are to 
attain to better things. But if they do not know their mission, 
if they are coming and going with all the moods of contraband 
sensibility, ignorant of their mission, and supposing that life's 
business is flax dressing, and that they are wasting their life- 
power in that engrossing and delightful business ; is it strange 
that there should be such rebellion ? 

This many-sided but all insided man, had not yet concen- 
trated himself on any thing that was appropriate to him. The 
forces he was striving to use were secondary, but those which 
were his real and predestined elements were only allowed to 
play alternatively. So he was inverting his life on the very 



28 BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 



threshold, and aiming at the wrong thing conscientiously, and 
only by stealth employing the glorious elements for whose very 
sake he had been born into the world. What a strange posi- 
tion ! At one time he appears as a disputant at Calvinistic 
theology — a good occupation — at another time rollicking with 
high felloM^s at a smuggling life, more full of force and brave 
daring than of moral honesty. At another he is in love and 
jilted ; then lamenting his fate; then, yet worse, he is obliged 
to endure public censure for the violation of rectitude, which 
no man despised more than he. Next he is writing to his 
father, and his very sincerity in contrast with his vain ways, 
makes it seem the more extraordinary. He says : 

" The weakness of my nervous system has so debilitated my 
mind, that I dare neither review the past events or look into 
futurity, for the least anxiety or perturbation produces the 
most unhappy effects upon my whole frame ; and sometimes, 
when for an hour or two my spirits are enlightened and I glim- 
mer into futurity, I am quite transported at the thought that 
ere long, perhaps very soon, I shall bid eternal adieu to all the 
pains, uneasiness, and disquietudes of this weary life ; for, I as- 
sure you, I am heartily tired of it. But if I do not deceive 
myself, I could contentedly and gladly resign it."' 

This letter was dated the 23rd of December. Three days 
afterward his mind was won back so that he consented to join 
in a carouse to welcome in the 'New Year; and as the merri- 
ment of that occasion ran high, a spark caught the flax, and 
the work of six months was burned in as many minutes. 

The next two years, his twenty-third and twenty-fourth, his 
outward life was dull ; his real life, sociality — good and bad. 
His poetry was good in the main ; but it was yet poetry as a 
relaxation — as a resource from unprofitable life. He says — 
" My passions once lighted raged up like so many devils until 



ORATION. 



29 



they got vent in rhyme. Then the conning over my verses, 
like a spell, soothed all into quiet." 

With all that flow of soul in him ; with his rebounding from 
the highest conviviality to the lowest despondency ; with his 
yearnings and longings for, he knew not what ; with a sensibil- 
ity that every object caused to tremble ; with an ambition un- 
derneath them all, wliich tossed and rocked him as the ocean 
swells and rocks the boats and ships in the bay, — he was yet 
trying to make himself think that he was to be a farmer. He 
bitterly felt this, what two years afterwards he plainly ex- 
presses — " Oh ! for a little of the cart-horse part of human 
nature!" 

Here was one of the most wonderful men ever born, who 
though not humble in the estimate of himself, never dreamed 
of his real place ; and, in his most noble audacitj^, never as- 
serted for himself a tithe of what the world now eagerly heaps 
upon him. Here w^as this brave fellow, with his heart hot and 
his head inspired with all manner of fancies, tender and sub- 
lime, who was endeavoring in the most patient and conscien- 
tious way possible, not to be what he was made for, and to be 
what he was not fitted for. 

James Gray, who taught the High School at Dumfries, says 
of Burns — "In our solitary walks on summer mornings, the 
simplest flowret by the way-side, every seat of rural simplicity 
and happiness, every creature that seemed to drink of the joy 
of the season, awakened the sympathy of his heart which flowed 
in spontaneous music from his lips ; and every new opening 
beauty, or the magnificence of the scene before him, called forth 
the poetry of his soul." 

It was not his fault that God made him a poet. It was not 
his fault that his heart was a heart upon which nature played. 
It was not his fault that he did not know where his strength lay. 



30 BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 



At the age of twenty-five liis fatlier died, and his brother 
Gilbert, himself, and liis mother had taken a farm. Now he 
means to settle this vexed question. 'Now he means to be a 
farmer in earnest ; to tlirive and do w^ell. " I had entered upon 
this farm," he says, " with a full resolution — Come, go to ! I 
will be wise. I read farming books, I attended markets, I cal- 
culated crops, and, in short, in spite of the devil and the world 
and the flesh, I believe I should have been a wise man, but the 
first year, from unfortunately buying bad seed, the second from 
a late harvest, we lost half our crops." 

No, not yet. Burns could not be a farmer first, then a poet. 
He would never thrive until his real genius had a full oppor- 
tunity of expression. When once he had poured his life forth 
in its true channels, and had felt that at length he had touched 
the aim of his being, then he might have become secondarily a 
good farmer ; but not now. And thus while he bought poor 
seed for farming, he was sowing good seed for poetry. For 
besides his bitter theological invective, he this year planted for 
immortality such poems as Halloween, and the Cotter's Satur- 
day Night. Though he had a late harvest of liis land, it was 
early and good in his brain. 

At length, at twenty-six years of age, he ventured to write 
" Robert Burns, Poet ;" and even then it M^as a title of honor, 
and not his real name. Even now, his being a poet is some- 
thing aside from the real purpose of his life. On the first of 
August, 1786, he published the first volume of his poems, by 
which he realized One Hundred Dollars. One Hundred Dol- 
lars ! Many an enterprising publisher would have been glad 
to give him a thousand — for that matter, ten thousand — dollars 
for one of them. 

He had got into great trouble. The mother of his babes was 
not his wife. Persecution hung over him ; his farming labors 



ORATION. 



31 



were disastrous, and lie determined, as the last resort of a broken- 
down and discouraged man, to go to Jamaica as an overseer of 
a plantation, 1 think I see Robert Burns on a plantation, with 
a whip under his arm ! I think I see Robert Burns following 
a gang of slaves, and chaunting "A man's a man for a' that." 
Poor Burns was in a very bad way, but he was not as bad as 
that. 

A new era dawned. By the fame of his published poems, 
he was summoned to Edinburgh, and for nearly a year he was 
courted and honored, and feted, in that splendid metropolis of 
the north, by men who then attracted universal attention, and 
yet became more eminent for being the friends of Burns. His 
modesty, his self-possession, his wonderful conversation, before 
which learned and practiced talkers bowed and acknowledged 
that the ploughman was their master; his brilliant wit and 
overflowing humor; his wonderful insight into human life; his 
passionate earnestness and eloquence, his sweetness, and good 
heartedness ; all his social qualities show that if Burns had 
from the first been placed in favorable circumstances, there 
would have been fewer shadows to mar the brilliancy of a fair 
fame. It is abundantly plain that if he had found as many 
friends to establish him in life, as he found afterwards to build 
his monument, the world would not have had such a melan- 
choly story of his sufferings and death. But so it is. This 
world is made for men who need no help while alive ; and 
there are always reasons found for not helping men whom the 
world afterwards mourns to the end ; and yet, while they mourn, 
their tears fall upon other men who are just as much neglected 
as those for whom they weep. 

Burns with the profits of his book now takes a farm at Ellis- 
land, about forty miles from his own. He married Jean Ar- 
mour, whom he had long loved and would have married before. 



32 BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION, 

if her lather had consented. Burns now being a man of repu- 
tation, a national poet, turns from the dissipations of Edinboro' 
to become in earnest a farmer. The ilhision is not out yet, for 
he says to a correspondent, " as, till within these eighteen 
months, I never was the wealthy master of ten guineas, my 
knowledge of business is to learn ; skill in the sober science of 
life is my most serious and hearty study." This was very well, 
you say. Every one can but wish that being so much, it had 
been more, and that snug, practical sagacity had been added to 
his poetical temperament. A man must have two natures to 
be a poet and a prosperous business man. They seldom are 
united ; yet, as it was, Burns vowed most solemnly and most 
foolishly two impossible things, namely, that he would forego 
poetry and all its temptations, and embrace industry in all its 
drudging particulars, and " Heaven be my helper," for it will 
take a strong effort to bring my mind to the routine of business. 
I have discharged the army of all my former pursuits, fancies 
and pleasures. So, now, we shall have Robert Burns without 
an eye, except for profits. No more flowers are to grace his 
vision, no more clouds are to sail above his head, no more 
brooks to rush along under fringing bushes, no more heart- 
throbs of patriotic fervor, and no more deep and sad out-look- 
ings upon human life, no more humorous conceptions of human 
folly and fashion. Robert Burns forswears all this. The mouse 
may And no house, the hare may die in the thicket, the birds 
may interpret their own musical lingo ; as for Burns, he is going 
to lay aside poetry and attend to the crops. Thus this great 
soul, with the whole fitness of life before it, dare not embrace 
it, and wMth the whole unfitness of his nature makes a covenant 
with business for life. It turned out, as one might imagine ; 
and not a great ways to New Year's day, 1789, he writes : 
" I have some favorite flowers in spring, among which are 



ORATION. 



the mountain daisy, the have-bell, the fox-glove, the -svild bvier- 
rose, the budding birch, and the hoary hawthorn, that I view 
and hang over with particular delight. I never hear the lond, 
solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer morn, or the wild 
mixing cadence of a troop of grey plovers, in an autumnal 
morning, without feeling an elevation of soul like the enthusi- 
asm of devotion or poetry. Tell me, my dear friend, to what 
can this be owing?" 

Ah, indeed, to what? It is not to farming evidently that it 
is owing. And these symptoms of back-sliding from farming 
to poetry ended in open apostacy, for within four days after 
this. Burns wi'ites in a letter to Dr. Moore : " The character 
and employment of a poet were formerly my pleasure, but now 
my pride. * * * Poesy 1 am determined to prosecute with 
all my vigor." 

His doubts becoming confirmed that his farming would not 
be remunerative, much against his taste, and repugnant to his 
nature, he thought of becotning an excise-man ; but he says, his 
wife and children reconciled him to ir. Fifty pounds a year 
are the temptation. Fifty pounds a year ! Acknowledged to 
be the first poet of Scotland, driven to destitution, and to tak- 
ing a most dangerous occupation for his farailj^'s sake, that he 
might be sure of bread ! His fears that he sliould make poor 
work with the farm were soon more than fears. He writes 
to a friend in December, 1789: "I am writing you on a 
farm. * * * My poor distracted mind is torn, and so 
jaded, and so wrecked, so be-deviled M'ith the attempt to 
make one guinea do the business of three, that I detest, abhor, 
and swoon at the word business." There's a man to make 



money 



He writes to Mr, Plill : — " I want a Shakspeare; I want like- 
wise an English Dictionary, Johnson's, I suppose, is best. In 
5 



3i BUENS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 

these and all my prose commissions, the cheapest is always the 
best for nie." 

The duties of excise-man were just the kind to spoil a far- 
mer, and we must add to spoil a man. For although it was 
not, as he terms it, a pleasant task, yet to be on horseback 
mainly, nnder the whole heaven dashing to and fro amidst 
beautiful scenery, and meeting jovial men, and being enter- 
tained by those jovial men, who would gladly fill an hour witli 
a man of Burns' genius, overflowing gaiety, and strong common 
sense, was as pleasant as it proved dangerous. 

His stay at Ellisland was short. He removed to Dumfries 
in 1791, to be occupied solely with the excise duties. Here he 
dwelt live years. Let those who have a heart for morbid anat- 
omy pursue the desponding poet in his uncongenial occupation, 
•udiile rebounding from it into convivialities and pleasures 
which his whole moral nature condemned wnth boiling indig- 
nation, and which almost literally seethed him in remorse. 
The English tongue has no language of remorse that surpasses 
Burns' in some of his letters. But I have no heart for such 
scenes. 

The last five years of his life were wonderfully fruitful of 
exquisite poetry. It was from Dumfries he sent more than a 
hundred songs wliich will live as long as the human heart 
sliall inspire the lips. His last letters were to friends beseech- 
ing some small levies to save him from jail and his family from 
starvation, and the money was refused. Yet so scrupulous was 
this man in respect to his expenses that when he died he owed 
no man a penny in the world. 

At length on the 21st of July, 1796, Robert Burns was per- 
mitted to depart out of that mortal tenement — to give to dust 
again that body which for thirty-seven years bore one of the 
most wonderful natures that time has ever known. Ko man 



ORATION. 



35 



has ever dreamed of making Burns a saint, and no one need 
dispute his moral claims, l^o man can write anything upon 
liis weaknesses and faults and sins which will not seem pale 
and lifeless beside liis own recorded words. There is nothing 
in the English language in testimony of domestic virtues more 
earnest, wholesome, and conscientious than his own. There are 
no wailings more agonizing for tlie violation of ])nrity ; no suf- 
fering that unites in its expression such simple, heartfelt con- 
fession of wrong with such pleadings against an indiscriminate 
judgment against him ; and neither moralist nor judge can ever 
add anything to the effectiveness of Burns' condemnation of 
those errors which clouded his life, eclipsed his joy, and at last 
ended his career. For my own part, in pursuing the necessary 
investigation for this task, which the partiality of his country- 
men (and now my countrymen,) have imposed upon me, I 
vibrated continually between smiles and tears, between adini- 
ration and sorrow, between wonder and pity, between rever- 
ence and condemnation. But amidst all these oppositions and 
conflicting opinions, steadily from the beginning Burns has 
grown upon my heart. I have felt at every step more and 
more tenderly the sorrow of one that loves, and when I have 
laid him in the grave it is with the grief of one who buries a 
brother or son. No man could keep company with him, even 
with the shadows of this wonderful creature, and not feel his 
power. Ilis vitality is beyond all example; his fullness inex- 
haustible ; his richness beyond all terms. Every letter, every 
sentence, teems — untrained, irregular and wild, yet you feel 
that he is master even in your criticisms, and in your judg- 
ments you find and feel that he is superior. There was more 
put into the making of Burns than in any man in his age. 
That which he has given to us of himself does by no means 
express or interpret the whole of what he was. A great deal 



n 



36 BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 

of his nature is like undng gold and unwashed diamonds. 
His songs and poems are like gold which you find in the Cali- 
fornian rivers, scattered particles, indicating how rich are the 
veins from which the)' were disintegrated. His letters are as 
wonderful as his poems, and his conversation is regarded as 
richer than either. While a half idiot was picking up, in 
London, evcr^^ little contemptible acorn that fell from the 
rugged branches of that gnarled old oak, Johnson, I would 
that some dainty Ariel could have waited upon the inspired 
ploughman, and stamped into record the inexhaustible flow 
of his wonderful and rapturous conversation. But for the 
most part it fell upon wasteful ears of men, unfit to know its 
worth. The multitude of Biirns's thonglits and most brilliant 
expressions hang in the past as crystals and white stalactites 
hang in unexplored caves, wonderfully beautiful, but forever 
hidden in darkness. 

Such is the vitality of Burns, that there is not a place where 
he put his foot, where there has not sprung np historical flow- 
ers ; and men, eminent before, have added to their eminence 
if Burns took them by the hand. The spots that wei'e hoary 
with historic glory were destined to receive additional attrac- 
tion if Burns visited them and touched them with his pen. 
Such vital force and such richness of soul had he, that there 
is no spot on the face of the last ten years of his life that was 
not crowded with memorials. His foot-prints, now a hundred 
years old, are yet warm. Artists, poets, historians, laymen of 
every name follow them with eager enthusiasm and with full 
cry. Alive, his cry of dying despair could not wring a pitiful 
ten pounds from indebted hands to save him from ruin. To- 
day, he has made the world rich. Alive, he could not earn 
food and raiment, nor control his livelihood ; but since the 
drop]3ing of the flesh he has clothed millions Avith garments 



ORATION. 



37 



of jov and fed them with the food of manhood and sturdy 
courage. His life was a failure until he died. Ever since it 
has been a marvelous success ; and death, that overthrew him, 
like the wind that scatters the dry seeds from the autumn 
boughs and whirls them away over the land, has scattered 
his thoughts into all the earth, to live and grow while there 
is soil in the human mind to receive the seeds of genius. Had 
he known the future, it would have consoled his heart, so 
yearning for sympathy, so longing and hankering for a true 
fame amidst the io-noble stru2:2;les of his battling life. That 
sturdy soul felt the true meaning of manhood and the supe- 
riority of manhood to the mere trappings of place and adven- 
titious glory ; and he walks crowned with praise and wreathed 
with loving smiles in all the habitable globe. He is the insep- 
arable companion of the Scot wherever he goes, and where is 
there a nook or isle of the earth where. the Scotchman does not 
go to make much out of a little, and make it easy? Where- 
ever he goes Burns goes with him. He is read in the camp, 
in the tropical forest, by the glare of torches in the South, and 
the light of the aurora-boreal is in the Korth. There is not a 
white hawthorn that blossoms in any spot upon the globe that 
has not been noade dear by Burns ; and Scotland in her joys 
and sorrows, and in her whole heart is known throughout the 
earth as much by the songs of Burns as by her boasted sons, 
noble as they are, and by her historians. Strange the power 
of the unfleshed spirit. 

Burns shows that it is not books that teach men to wrestle 
with the passions of the human life, but a heart. There is this 
rough-clad son of earth touching the marrow of things in his 
cold and sequestered nook, pondering over things which sad- 
dened the heart of the great legislator, which tinged Homer's 
view of life, and which engaged the minds of Plato and So- 



38 BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 

crates and every thinking man to the Advent, and since then. 
I think the worst things of Burns were written early — his bit- 
ter invectives and raillery. As he lived to see real trouble 
and to struggle with the stream of life, his stream of poetry, 
with some sad exceptions, ran clearer. His most exquisite 
songs, his finest delineations of nature, his most noble strains 
and thoughtful appeals were the fruits of his middle and later 
life. But it seems a mockery almost to speak of the later 
periods of a life which ended before most men's lives are 
earnestly begun. At forty men are fully men. Burns had 
been dead three years, when the number of forty was counted 
from the day of his birth. And had it pleased Him who 
wielded this bright star in our firmament, to have permitted 
it to be advanced, until it filled out its orbit here, what might 
we not have inherited? Had his life reached as far as his 
father's or mother's we should now be speaking of those works 
we have from his hands as the mere first fruits of liis labors. 
All we now possess, perad venture, would then have seemed 
like his own harebells and daisies. To him it was given to 
lift up the lowly. No finer genius has ever delineated the 
external forms of nature. No poet has ever better sung the 
humors of his fellow men. He lifted up the superstitions of 
the time and gave them beauty ; and gathering up the lower 
thoughts of men, and shedding the light of his genius upon 
them, has made them beautiful forever. He danced with 
witches in the kirk yard, and followed with them through the 
grim air. He hung flowers even upon the brow of Satan ; 
Milton did the same ; and I think the reverence of the one, 
and the veneration of the other was about alike. But all these 
were the mere externals of poetry. The life and power of his 
work was in that deep moral element which pervaded his 
nature and gave out such sacred grandeur, and which lifted 



ORATION". 



39 



upon the eternal future such trembling and agonizing glances. 
The power of Bui-ns's songs consists in their moral tone. If 
that were dissolved from them, they, too, would dissolve and 
fall in pieces. It is not wit nor humor, nor pathos, which was 
the centre of Burns. When you look upon a tree, it is not 
the wood — the root, which strikes the eye ; it is the thousand 
branches and ten thousand leaves and buds and blossoms. 
And yet that sober, solid centre of wood is that which enables 
the tree to support so many boughs, to shake so many leaves, 
and shed its perfume abroad. Thus it is with Burns. Some 
leaves fall from his boughs, worm-eaten ; some of the branches 
may be maimed or cankered ; but the great tree, the centre, 
the substance, stands up hearty, healthy, human, and divine. 
Some have supposed that our solar system, in its vast trav- 
erses of space, strikes at times aerial streams of warmth or 
cold, making some years memorable over othei's for the degree 
of heat or cold wliich attends them ; so the world seems to 
swing througli vast cycles of ideas. The time in which Burns 
lived was eminent for the outburst, all over the civilized world, 
of the spirit of Liberty. This divine spirit came forth as did 
Lazarus from the sepulchre, bound hand and foot, and in the 
habiliments of the grave. Liberty in politics ran wantonly 
into license, and liberty in religion Avent into blind infidelity. 
Yet the spirit of liberty pervaded the world ; and no man in 
all that period was a more faithful apostle of liberty than Burns. 
It did not develop itself in political theories or philosophical 
speculation. It did not touch the external forms of society at 
all ; it Avent to the root of all things — the ineradicable worth 
of man as a child of God — a frail experimental creature of 
time, a lingering, wistful, expectant of a better state. The 
dignity and rights of the individual inspired Burns, and burned 
like an unquenchable fire upon the altar of his soul. He had 



40 BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 



no enmity to kings — but always first and last in his earliest 
poetry as well as in the latest, he bore M'itness with all the 
fidelity of an apostle and poAver of the poet to the fundamental 
doctrine that essential Manhood is the only greatness, and that 
nothing can exalt a man but himself, and nothing degrade him 
but himself. Through his whole life, this life for man was 
eminently not for him who had wealth, learning, influence, 
position, and power, but for man in his simple nature, as given 
by God. No tenderer heart ever cheered the sorrowful and 
the needy. No poet ever poured upon the heart more balm 
or fragrance than he. No name has ever made manhood more 
resonant in virtues, or more nobly invested man with honesty, 
reliance, patience, contentment, and self-respect, than Burns. 
His poems are a torch that never goes out, to all who are in 
dai-k places ; and no man harassed by trouble, distracted by 
temptation, overcome by passion, and plunged in remorse, 
but M'ill find language for his woes in the poetry of Burns. 
He himself has felt the sins and ills of the flesh, and no man, 
among the school of poets, ever was so true to his kind, 
rejoicing with those that rejoice, and weeping with those that 
weep ; and the nation which read Burns in the nursery could 
never have tyrants in the Parliament House. The men who 
drink at Burns's spring will be too stnrdy for oppression, too 
courageous for power to tamper with, and with too much self- 
respect for blandishments and bribes. Burns had pre-eminently 
this love for man in all his moods, Aveaknesses, sorrows, joys, 
hopes, and fears for life, and for eternal life. He is universal 
in his sympathy. He loves the very shoe-latches of the poor 
Scotch peasant. He loves the very daisy his shoe trod upon. 
Terrible often with rage that sounds as thunder in the moun- 
tains, yet it is love both personal and general that marks the 
poems of Burns, and that gives them their wondrous vitality. 



ORATION. 



41 



and will never let them die so long as a soul yearns, or hearts 
desire to be tenderly cheered. 

Finally, to-night let us give to the memory of Burns some- 
thing of that food of love and praise which his own soul hun- 
gered for, his life long, and never had. If he has faults, let us, 
like them of old, walking backward with reverence and affec- 
tion, cast a mantle upon them. If every man within these 
twenty-four hours the world around who shall speak the name 
of Burns with fond admiration were registered as his subjects, 
no king on earth would have such a realm. Finally, could 
each feeling be changed into a flower, and cast down before 
his memory, a mountain would ai'ise, and he would sit upon a 
rose of blossoms now at length without a thorn. 

[When Mr. Beecher had concluded his eloquent address, he 
received the congratulations of a number of distinguished citi- 
zens, and was tendered the thanks of the audience by acclama- 
tion.] 
6 



h^ tfjeiitiiHiii Ji^tliial 



ASTOR HOUSE 



On Tuesday evening, January 25, 1859, the Centennial An- 
niversary was celebrated by a Festival at the Astor House. The 
established character of this time-honored and popular hotel, 
together with the fact that, in previous years, many a brilliant 
assembly had gathered there to honor the memory of Burns, 
commended it to the committee of arrangements as peculiarly 
appropriate for this celebration. 

The courteous host, Mr. Charles A. Stetson, with his asso- 
ciates and assistants, had made ample arrangements for the 
reception and accommodation of the company. The dinner 
was to be served in the spacious dining-room, three tables 
being arranged in parallel lines, at the head of which, upon a 
dais, was the table designed for the accommodation of the 
Chairman and guests. The room was appropriately decorated 
with the national flags of America, England, Scotland, and 
Ireland ; and a number of illustrative paintings, several of 
which were executed expressly for this occasion. Among 
them was one, eighteen by twenty-five feet, painted by James 
L. Dick, a member of the Club, representing Burns at the 
Flow, and the Genius of Foetry casting her mantle over him. 
There were also four large paintings by Hillyard, represent- 
ing the Return from Labor, from the " Cotter's Saturday 
Night ;" a scene from " Tarn O'Shanter ;" Burns's Cottage ; 



THE CENTENARY FESTIVAL. 



43 



and his Monument at Ayr. A large portrait of Burns, draped 
with flags, was suspended at the head of the room ; on the 
right, a tine portrait of Washington ; on the left, one of Frank- 
lin : the two last painted by Yanderlyn and Duplessis. In 
front of the guests' table were placed a bust of Burns and one 
of Walter Scott — that of Burns was crowned with a laurel 
wreath, and was a copy of the much admired original ex- 
ecuted by J. C. King, of Boston, who was present among the 
guests. 

Various articles of interest, in connection with Burns, were 
contributed for the occasion. Among them : — A piece of 
bark, elegantly framed, cut from a tree on Burns's farm, on 
which is carved the inscription " E. Burns, 1779 ;" presented 
by the wife of the poet to Mr, Renwick, now of this city ; also 
an old Jacobite song book, well worn, formerly in possession 
of Burns, contributed by the same gentleman : — A lock of 
Bnrns's hair, and an impression of his seal, furnished by Mr, 
Dinwiddie, Secretary of St. Andrews' Society : — Yarious other 
articles, for use or ornament, were furnished by Messrs, Wm. 
Gibson, J, 0, McRae, T. Lynch, Captain Wm. Manson, and 
others. 

At an early hour the company began to assemble. Every 
seat had been disposed of, and large as was the number pres- 
ent, it might have been greatly increased, as in several 
instances high premiums were offered for tickets, A number 
of gentlemen were present in full Highland costume, represent- 
ing the Caledonian Club. The members and guests wore ap- 
propriate badges of rich silk tartan. 

At the proper time the company proceeded to the dining- 
room, and remained standing in their places, awaiting the 
entrance of the Honorary Chairman and guests, who appeared 
immediately after, preceded by a piper in full costume, and 



44 



BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 



escorted by the President of the Club. Ou the appearance of 
Mr. Bryant, and as he passed througli the long lines of the 
company to the head of the room, he was greeted with simul- 
taneous enthusiasm. 

Before the company were seated, grace was said by Rev. 
Henky Wakd Beecher. 

The names of the guests and others are annexed. 

at the head of the koom, upon the dais. 



The Honorary Chairman, 
WILLIAM CITLLEN BRYANT, 



SUPPORTED By 



FiTz Greene IIalleck, 



Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, 
Rev. Samuel Osgood, 
James T. Brady, 
Charles Gould, 
Horace Greeley, 
Parke Godwin, 
Louis R. Mignot, 



Gulian C. Yerplanck, 
Hon. D. F. TiEMANN, 
Dr. John W. Francis, 
Peter Cooper, 
J. C. King (of Boston), 
Wm. S. Thayer, 
H. W. L. Barnes, 
J. Cunningham, 

EepresCnting Burns Clnb. 



AT THE CENTEAL TABLE, FACING THE CHAIE. 

The Honorary Vice President, 
EDWARD M. ARCHIBALD (H. B. M. Consul,) 



SUPPORTED BY 



Dr. J. C. Beales, 

Pres. St. George's Society. 
Adam Norrie, 

Pres. St. Andrews Society. 
Richard Bell, 



William Young, 

Editor K Y. Albion. 
Mr. Andrews, 

late U. S. Con. Gen. in Can'a. 
Major Gen. Chas. W. Sanford, 



represent. St. Patrick's Soc. Dr. Ward. 





THE CENTENARY FESTIVAL 


45 




ON THE RIGHT AND LEFT. 






Joseph Latng, 






First Vice President of the Club. 






John D. N^orcott, 






Second Vice President. 




THE COMPANY GENERALLY, INCLUDING 


MEMBERS. 


Robert Dinwiddie, 


Robert McClellan, 


J. Coleridge Hart, 


Jas. W. Maitland, 


Stuart Garden, 


John Morton, 


Robert Gordox, 


Alex. Gaw, 


Col. Wm. Halsey, 


John Betts, 


Isaac Hoose, 


Col. Thos. Tate, 


Geo. Cruikshank, 


Timothy Waters, 


Jas. Somerville, 


James F. White, 


William Templar, 


John Somerville, 


John McClure, 


Geo. Mitchell, 


James C. Derby, 


Thos. C. M. Paton, 


John Parker, 


Edwin Jackson, 


"Wm. Paton, 


Rob't Struthers, 


John K. Allen, 


L. Agnew, 


Wm. H. Morrison, 


Henry S. Allen, 


Jas. B. Cochran, 


John Haybourn, 


Geo. Nimmo, 


John Grierson, 


David B. Drysdale, 


Wm. Hepburn, 


John Roberton, 


Thos. Weldon, 


Wm. Wakefield, 


Callender, 


John T. Howell, 


Rob't Neilson, 


Anderson, 


Clutt, 


John A. Parks, 


Benj. B. Tilt, 


Robert Cross, 


Wm. Lang, 


Jas. Harvey, 


I. A. Morand, 


Wm. Park, 


John H. Raymond, 


J. C. McRae, 


Chas. Burns, 


Thos. Blackburn, 


P. Stevenson, 


Thos. Gow, 


Arch'd Park, 


Wm. Mathews, 


Edward Fisher, 


Henry Sibree, 


L. McIxTOSH (Iowa), 


John A. McLean, 


John Whittaker, 


Captain Reid, 


T. C. Latto, 


H. Crabtree, 


Geo. Brodie, 


Rob't Gun, 


Geo. Marshall, 


Chas.'Burt, 


Edward Kearney, 


Edward Courtlandt, 


C. D. Newman, 


Wm. Manson, 


Andrew S. Eadie, 


David Miranda, 


John Robertson, 


T. B. Peddie, 


Geo. Simpson, 


John R. Hunter, 


John L. Bailey, 


Jas. G. Maeder, 


Wm. Brough, 



46 



BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 



Robert Rait, 
J. T. Miller (Montreal), 
John Ireland, 
Edward Walker, 
Alex. McEwen, 
Alex. Campbell, 
John J. Mum, 
John Steuart, 
J. Fred. Milward, 
Geo. a. Clark, 
Peter McLeod, 
F. Nicholson, 

Emerson, 

Armstrong, 

J. Cameron, 
M. Conachie, 
Adam Stodart, 
Jas. Wotherspoon, 
Wm. McNab, 
R. W. Turner, 
Thos. Glendinning, 
Wm. B. Edgar, 
Robt. Edgar, 
Adam Farish, 
Alex. M. McKay, 
Jas. Picken, 

Brown, 

Alex. Cross, 
Alfred R. Booth, 
Jas. Cumming, 
DAVID Lamb, 
John Moffat, 



C. S. Grafulla, 
Dr. F. GouRAUD, 
Frank Leslie, 
James Renwick, 
G. Swan, 
T. Horn, Jr., 
T. Lynch, 
Geo. H. Andrews, 
John McAuliffe, 
H. Maass, 
John Foster, 
Page Gale, 
F. Kellers, 

Verden, 

Benj. F. Miller, 
Geo. S. Hartt, 
Henry Hillyard, 

Moorhead, 

John Aitken, Sen,, 
Richard Cochrane, 
Robert Meldrum, 
W. S. Clirehugh, 
Vair Clirehugh, Jr., 
Jas. Watson, 
L. Markey, 
J. M. Morrison, 
Rob't Macfarlane, 
Jas. Nicholson, 
David Rutherford, 
Wm. Burns, 
John Crabtree, 
David Stewart, 



John McDonough, 
Wm. Robertson, 
Dr. Wm. Johnson, 
Geo. Rintoul, 
John R. Watson, 
John Muir, 
Fred'k Hale, 
John Burt, 
Thos. Howitt, 
Jas. L. Dick, 
H. H. Dow, 
Daniel Eraser, 
Dr. Jas. Norval, 
Thos. McRae, 
Jas. Blane, 
Rob't Donald, 

T. C. GOURLAY, 

John White, 
Rob't McNie, 
John Fell, 
WiL H. Morrison, 
W. G. Coutts, 
Wm. B. Robertson, 
John W. Sumner, 
John Stewart, 
Rob't Davidson, 
Jas. Quee, 
Daniel Dove, 
Rob't Burnet, 
Wm. Cleland, 
W. W. Wotherspoon, 
F. G, Fontaine. 



[The names of upward of two hundred of the persons pres- 
sent at the Festival are given in the foregoing list. About fiftj' 
others were present, but it has not been practicable to obtain 
their names in season for this publication.] 



The press of the city was represented by a number of gen- 
tlemen as reporters for the Scottish American Journal^ Thnes^ 
Tribune^ Herald^ Express, Sim, and other papers, who occu- 
pied seats at the central table near the Chairman. 



THE CENTENAKY FESTIVAL. 47 



Of the dinner it need only be said that it was served in the 
usual excellent style of the Astor House. Every delicacy was 
supplied in profusion, and every article was of the choicest 
quality. The tables were adorned with numerous pieces of 
ornamental confectionary and pastry, among which were rep- 
resented : Burns and Highland Mary ; Burns' Monument ; The 
Return of the Laborer ; Tarn O'Shanter and the Witches ; 
" Here are we met, three merry boys ;" Scotch Pavilion ; Lyric 
Cottage ; Temple of Worth ; Highland Tower ; Alloway Kirk ; 
Burns' Birthplace. At dinner and during the evening appro- 
priate music was supplied by Robertson's excellent band ; and 
Mr. Cleland performed a number of national airs on the 
Scottish pipes. 



When the cloth was removed, 

Mr. J. Cunningham said, that as the President of the Club, 
he had the honor of presenting Mr. William Cullen Bryant 
as the Honorary Chairman, and Mr. Edward M. Archibald as 
the Honorary Yice-President of the occasion. He said the 
thanks of the Club were due to those gentlemen for the cor- 
diality with which they had accepted the positions which had 
been tendered them ; also to the press of the city and country 
for the courtesy displayed in giving publicity to the objects 
and purposes of the Club ; and to Messrs. G. Swan and J. 
Horn, jr., for the free use of the telegraph lines under their 
control. He also expressed the fraternal feeling of the Club 
with all other associations engaged in celebrating the occasion. 
After adding a few remarks relative to the business of the 
evening, he read a few of the following letters, addressed to 
Yair Clirehugh, Jr., Esq., Corresponding Secretary of the 
Club, which were received with hearty applause. 



LETTERS. 



FROM WASHINGTON IRVING. 

SuNNYSiDE, Nov. 22d, 1858. 
Dear Sir : 

I feel properly sensible of the honor done me by the Burns Club in inviting 
me to the dinner with which they propose to celebrate the Centennial Anniversary 
of the birth of the poet, Robert Burns ; but I regret to say that the state of my 
health obliges me to excuse myself from accepting any invitation of the kind. 

With great respect, 

Your obedient servant, 

Washington Irving. 



from HON. JAMES BUCHANAN, PRESIDENT U. S. 

Washington, 15 January, 1859. 
Dear Sir: 

I have received your kind invitation, on behalf of "The Burns Club of the 
City of New York," to be present at the festival dinner, to be given in honor of the 
Centennial Anniversary of the poet's birth. I should esteem it a great pleasure 
as well as a high privilege to be with you on this occasion ; but my public duties 
here render it impossible. 

Poor Burns I I have always deplored his hard fate. He has ever been a favorite 
of mine. The child of genius and of misfortune, he is read every where and by all 
classes throughout the estent of our country, and his natural pathos has reached 
all hearts. Yours very respectfully, 

James Buchanan. 



FROM rev. JOHN THOMSON. 

11 Varick Place, N. Y., 13th Dec, 1858. 
Dear Sir : 

By reason of family affliction I am prevented taking part this winter in any pub- 
lic or social entertainment. Had it been otherwise with me than it is, I would have 
availed myself at once of the kind invitation of the Burns Club, that I might have 
shown my appreciation of the character and works of our great national, but greatly 
misunderstood poet. I have the pleasure to be, dear Sirs, 

Very truly yours, 

John Thomson. 



FROM rev. henry W. BELLOWS. 

New York, Dec. 14, 1858. 
Dear Sir: 

I am much honored by the invitation of the " Burns Club of the City of 
New York," to its dinner on the 25th January. The state of my health does not 
allow me to make positive engagements so far ahead ; yet I am not wiUing to cut 



myself off from the pleasure of so delightful a reunion. If jou will allow me to 
come, if my health al the time permits, I shall have the greatest pleasure in accept- 
ing your invitation. I will, with your permission, send you positive word, as the 
day approaches. Very respectfully yours. 

Hexry W. Bellows. 



FROM REV. GEO. AV. BETHUNE, 

Brooklyn, Dec. 14, 1858. 
My Dear Sir : 

I sincerely regret that my engagements will not permit me to accept the 
invitation with whicli I have been lionored by the Burns Club of New Yorlc, to 
dine with them on the Centennial Anniversary of Burns' birth. As a Scotsman's 
bairn and an ardent student of Scotch literature, I heartily sympathise with your 
admiration of Scotland's greatest lyrical poet, and it would be a delightful privilege 
to share in the aspirations and entertainments of your festival. As it is, I must 
bear the deprivation as I may. With many thanks for your kind remembrance of 
me and my best wishes for yourself and associates, 

I am very respectfull}'. 

Your obedient servant, 
Geo. W. Bethune. 



from rev. e. h. chapin. 

134 12th Street, Jan. 3d, 1859. 
Dear Sir : 

I very much regret that an engagement out of town prevents my acceptance 
of your invitation to the dinner in honor of tlie Centennial Anniversary of the 
birth of Robert Burns. It will be a festival at which I should be proud to be 
present, and had Burns never written any thing but "A man's a man for a' that," 
I would cheerfully go miles to express my admiration for him, and my love. 

I am, Sir, 

Yery respectfully yours, 

E. H. Chapin. 



FROM LORD NAPIER. 



H. B. M. Legation, 
Washington, Nov. 20th, 1858. 



Sir: 



I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of the 19th instant, 
conveying to me an invitation to attend the dinner to be given at the Astor House 
in honor of the Centennial Anniversary of the birth of the poet Robert Burns, on 
the 25th of January next. 

I regret that my engagements at Washington will not permit me to be present 
on the occasion referred to. I am. Sir, 

Your obedient servant, 

Napier. 



50 



BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 



from hon. edward everett. 

Boston, 29 Nov., 1858. 
Dear Sir: 

Your favor of the 19th reached me, a day or two since, kindly inviting me 
to attend the dinner to be given at the Astor House on the 25th of January next, 
in honor of the Centennial Anniversary of the poet Burns. 

I am greatly indebted to you for the honor of this invitation. Owing to a condi- 
tional engagement in another quarter, the fulfilment of which depends upon circum- 
stances not yet decided, it is not in my power at present to return a positive 
answer. 

It will give me great pleasure to be present, if possible, on an occasion of so 
much interest. I remain, dear Sir, 

Very respectfully yours, 

Edward Everett. 



FROM OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

Boston, Nov. 27th, 1858. 

Dear Sir: 

I regret that my imperative engagements in Boston will not allow me to 
have the pleasure of being present at the Centennial Anniversary celebration of the 
birth day of Robert Burns, by the Burns Club of New York. 

If I had by good fortune been present at the coming anniversary — as a native of 
the sister isle might be excused for saying — and had been unexpectedly called 
upon for a word in honor of the occasion, I should, on the spur of the moment 
have ventured to give the following : 

The memory of tlie monarch minstrel who made the dialect of a province the 
language of the universal heart throughout a mighty empire, and the realms 
which its arms and arts have colonized : his melodies are the life-winged thistle- 
down that sows the emblem of Scottish truth, and manhood, and sentiment, as far 
as it can fly upon the winds of Heaven I Yours verv truly, 

6. W. Holmes. 



from henry W. LONGFELLOW. 

Cambridge, Dec. 1, 1858. 
Dear Sir: 

I have had the honor of receiving the invitation of the Burns Club to attend 
their dinner on the 25th of January. 

I feel much gratified by this attention, and regret extremely that my engagements 
will not permit me to accept it. 

Begging you to make my best acknowledgments to the gentlemen of the Club, 

I remain, dear Sir, 

Your obedient servant, 

Henry W. Longfellow. 



from bayard TAYLOR. 

Boston, Dec. 17, 1858. 
Dear Sir: 

I have delayed answering your invitation, hoping that it might be pos- 
sible for me to be with you on the evening of the 25th of January next. My 
engagements, however, oblige me to relinquish all hope of it. 



THE CENTENARY FESTIVAL. 51 



I was fortunate enough to be present at the pubhc welcome given to the sons of 
Burns on their return from India, on the banks of the Doou, on the 6tb of August, 
1844, and the venerable face of the poet's sister is still distinctly impressed on my 
memory. Reverencing as I do, the name, the genius, and the manhood of Burns, I 
should rejoice in being able to unite with your club and my brotlier authors in 
doing fitting honor to liis memory. If I can possibly find time, I will send a leaf 
for the garland which will be laid upon his grave. 

Very respectfully yours, 

Bayard Taylor. 



FKUM JOIIX G. SAXE. 

Burlington, Vt., Dec. 10, 1858. 
Dear Sir : 

Nothing could gratify me more than to accept your invitation to attend 
the dinner to be given at the Astor House, January 25th, 1859, in honor of the 
Centennial Anniversary of the birth-day of the poet, Robert Burns; yet I have 
little hope that my lecture-engagements will allow me to be present on that occa- 
sion. I beg to assure you, however, that in the spirit of your festival I shall be of 
your number, as a cordial and devout admirer of Robert Burns — 

-that mightiest poet of the heart, 



Whom nature blessed beyond the reach of ar</" 

and whom all true men, every where, love and praise. Thanking you for the high 
honor proposed to me by your invitation, I am. 

Very trulj^ yours, 

John G. Saxe. 



FROM DION BOURCICAULT. 

Willard's Hotel, 
"Washington, D. C, 4 Jan., 1859. 
Dear Sir : 

I regret to say that my professional engagements will most probably oblige 
me to be aijsent from New York on the date of tlie Centennial Anniversary. 

Deeply symjoathising with your object, I feel that I have lost one of the most 
pleasant and most intellectual of all the associations with which life is speckled — 
no brighter beacon could a man look back to in after days than a " Night wi' 
Burns." 

Should I be able to escape, I wiU promptly appear. 

Yours very truly, 

Dion Bourcicault. 



from the governor of the state of new YORK. 

State of New York, 

Executive Departjuent, 

Albany, January, 1859. 
Sir: 

Your kind letter of the 8t]i inst., inviting me on behalf of the Burns Club of 
the City of New York, to be present at the festival dinner to be given at the Astor 



015 



BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 



House on the 25th of this month, in honor of the birth of the poet, Robert Burns, is 
before me. 

I need not say to you that it would afford me great pleasure to be present on the 
occasion you name, but my official duties will prevent my absence from Albany at 
that time, when not only the members of your club, but thousands of others in 
Europe and America will celebrate the birth of the people's poet. It was a happy 
idea that both continents should join in celelirating the birth day of Robert Burns, 
whose simple poems awake responsive emotions alike in the hearts and homes of 
his native land, in the cabins of the pioneers upon our western prairies, and in the 
huts of the Australian shepherds. He wins alike the hearts of the cultivated and 
the uncultivated, and his fame must continue to increase while that of others — more 
petted during their lives — is gradually passing away. 

Begging you to present to the Burns Club of the City of New York my regrets 
that I cannot be with them in person at their festival, and my wishes for their 
prosperity, I am yours. 

Very respectfully, 

E. D. Morgan. 



FROM HUGH MAXWELL. 

New York, Dec. 3d, 1858. 
My dear Sir: 

I return my very sincere thanks for the kind invitation to participate with 
the gentlemen of the Burns Club in the festival proposed in honor of the memory 
of the immortal poet. 

Having declined for several years to attend the festivals on public occasions, I 
regret it will not be in my power, consistent with former declinations, to be present 
at j'our honored festival. 

My heart warms to the memor}"- of Burns, to the scenes he has so sweetly sung, 
and no one would be more delighted to do honor to his memory. 

I am very respectfully. 

Your friend and obedient servant, 

H. Maxwell. 



from JOHN L. LEWIS, GR.\ND MASTER, ETC. 

Office of the Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted 
Masons of the State of New York. 

Penn Yan, New York, January 20th, 1859. 

Dear Sir: 

Absence from home has prevented an earlier response to your kind invi- 
tation extended by the ''Burns Club," to me as the Grand Master of the Masonic 
Fraternity in this State to attend the festival dinner to be given on Tuesday next in 
honor of the Centennial Anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns. 

Most gladly would I be present, did my engagements permit, to unite in doing 
honor to the character and memory of Burns as the man, the jjoet, and the Mason, 
and to testify as the present chief representative of the Craft in the State of New 
York our high appreciation of the genius which has shed such undj-ing lustre 
upon our simple annals as a brotherhood — for he was our brother. Of all the 
revered dead who while living have been enrolled in our ranks abroad, his is the 
name which is ever present as a vivid and glowing reality. The farewells which he 
sang to his brethren at Tarbolton with such affecting pathos still touch an answer- 



ing chord in many a heart, and still tremble upon the lips of the thousands of his 
brethren in all lands. They are a memento of their gifted author wherever his 
peculiar dialect of the English tongue still kindles fond memories ; or the " Sons of 
Light" are assembled, when "that hieroglyphic light" is glowing; and while they 
awaken tender emotions in others, they are never disconnected from the remem- 
brance of him, who first breathed their beautiful melody. And yet this was but 
one of his undying strains of feeling, and of beaut}' ! 

The ol)ject of the "Burns Club" in renewing afresh such genial memories by an 
observance of the anniversary of the birth of the Ayrshire bard on this side of the 
ocean, and thus fostering the links which connect us with the genius of the mother- 
land, can but commend itself to the cordial sympathies of every one in the United 
States who is an admirer of true poetic feeling ; and it was fitting that one of our 
most cherished poets should have been selected to preside at such a festival. 

You have the most cordial wishes of the Masonic Fraternity that it may be a 
joyous reunion; and I trust that the Deputy Grand Master, John W. Simons, Esq., 
of New York, will be present to represent them and me upon the occasion. Lest 
he should fail to do so, will you at some fitting opportunity be pleased to ofter in 
my behalf this sentiment : 

Robert Burns — As a man, pure gold without the guinea stamp ; as a poet, ever 
sweet, tender and truthful; as a Mason, fit to be "oft honored with supreme 
command." I have the honor to be, 

Very respectfully and sincerely, 
Yours, &c. 

John L. Lewis, Jr. 

Grand Master. 



Invitations to attend the Festival had also been accepted by 
a number of gentlemen who were unable to be present, among 
whom w^ere the following: Rev. Dr. S. I. Pkime, Henky J. 
Raymond, Louis Gaylokd Clark, Geokge P. Morris, and R. S. 
Willis. 

Mr. Bryant then rose to address the company, when he was 
greeted with a storm of enthusiastic applause, that lasted for 
several minutes. 

MR. Bryant's speech. 

The very kind manner, my friends, in which you have re- 
ceived me, encourages me to think that you will not be unwill- 
ing to listen to a word or two, introducing the toasts of the 
evening. My first duty is to thank my excellent friends of the 
Burns Club, with whom I do not now meet for the first time, 



54 



BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 



and whose annual festivities are among the pleasantest I ever 
attended, for the honor they have done me in calling me to the 
chair 1 occnp)' — an honor more to be prized on account of the 
rare occasion on which it is bestowed. An honor which can 
be conferred but once in a century, is an honor indeed. 

This evening, the memory of Burns will be celebrated as it 
never was before. His fame, from the time when he first ap- 
peared before the world as a poet, has been growing and 
brightening, as the morning brightens into the perfect day. 
There never was a time when his merits were so freely ac- 
knowledged as now ; when the common consent of the literary 
world has placed him so high, or spoke his praises with so little 
intermixture of disparagement ; when the anniversary^ of his 
birth could have awakened so general and fervent an enthusiasm. 

If we could imagine a human being endowed with the power 
of making himself, through the medium of his senses, a witness 
of whatever is passing on the face of the globe, what a series of 
festivities, what successive manifestations of the love and admi- 
ration which all who sj^eak our language bear to the great 
Scottish poet, would present themselves to his observation, 
accompanying the shadow of this night in its circuit round the 
earth ! Some twelve hours before this time he would have 
heard the praises of Burns recited, and the songs of Buiiis 
sung, on the banks of the Ganges — the music flowing out at 
the open windows on the soft evening air of that region, and 
mingling with the murmurs of the sacred river. A little later, 
he might have heard the same sounds from the mouth of the 
Euphrates; later still, from the southern extremity of Africa, 
under constellations strange to • our eyes — the stars of the 
southern hemisphere — and almost at the same moment from 
the rocky shores of the Ionian Isles. Next they would have 
been heard from the orange groves of Malta, and from the 



THE CENTENARY FESTIVAL. 55 



winter colony of English and Americans on the hanks of the 
Tiber. Then, in its turn, the Seine takes up the strain ; and 
what a chorns rises from the British Isles — from every ocean- 
mart, and river, and mountain- side, with a distant response 
from- the rock of Gibraltar ! Last, in the Old World, on its 
westernmost verge, the observer whom I have imagined, would 
have heard the voice of song and of gladness from the coasts 
of Liberia and Sierra Leone, among a race constitutionally and 
passionately fond of music, and to which we have given our 
language and literature. 

Li the New World, frozen Newfoundland has already led in 
the festival of this night ; and next, those who dwell where the 
St. Lawrence holds an icy mirror to the stars ; thence it has 
passed to the hills and valleys of New England; and it is now 
our turn on the lordly Hudson. The Schuylkill will follow, 
the Potomac, the rivers of the Carolinas ; the majestic St. 
John's, drawing his dark, deep waters from the Everglades ; 
the borders of our mighty lakes, the beautiful Ohio, the Great 
Mississippi, with its fountains gushing under fields of snow, and 
its mouth among flowers that fear not the frost. Then will our 
festival, in its westward course, cross the Rocky Mountains, 
and gather in joyous assemblies those who pasture their herds 
on the Columbia, and those who dig for gold on the Sacra- 
mento. 

By a still longer interval, it will pass to Australia, lying in her 
distant solitude of waters, and now glowing with the heats of mid- 
summer, where I fear the zealous countrymen of Burns will find 
the short night of the season too short for their festivities. And 
thus will this commemoration pursue the sunset round the globe, . 
and follow the journey of the evening star till the gentle planet 
shines on the waters of China. 

Well has our great poet deserved this universal commemo- 



56 



BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 



ration — for who has written like him? What poem descrip- 
tive of rural manners and virtues, rural life in its simplicity 
and dignity — ^yet without a single false outline or touch of 
false coloring — clings to our memories and lives in our bo- 
soms like his " Cotter's Saturday Night?" What humorous 
narrative in verse can be compared with his "Tam O'Shan- 
ter?" From the fall of Adam to his time, I believe, there 
was nothing w^ritten in the vein of his " Mountain Daisy ;" 
others have caught his spirit from that poem, but who among 
them all has excelled him? Of all the convivial songs I have 
ever seen in any language, there is none so overflowing with 
the spirit of conviviality, so joyous, so contagious as his song 
of " Willie brewed a peck o' maut." What love-songs are 
sweeter and tenderer than those of Burns? What song ad- 
dresses itself so movingly to our love of old friends and our 
pleasant recollections of old days as his "Auld Lang Syne," 
or to the domestic aifections so powerfully as his " John An- 
derson ?" 

You heard yesterday, my friends, and will hear again to- 
night, better things said of the genius of Burns than I can say. 
That will be your gain and mine. But there is one observa- 
tion which, if I have not already tried your patience too far, 
I would ask your leave to make. If Burns was thus great 
among poets, it was not because he stood higher than they 
by any pre-eminence of a creative and fertile imagination. 
Original, affluent, and active his imagination certainl}^ was, 
and it was always kept under the guidance of a masculine 
and vigorous understanding ; but it is the feeling which lives 
in his poems that gives them their supreme mastery over the 
minds of men. 

Burns was thus great because, whatever may have been the 
errors of his after-life, when he came from the hand that 



THE CENTENAEY FESTIVAL. 57 

formed him— 1 say it with tlie profoundest reverence — God 
breathed into him in larger measure than into otlier men, the 
spirit of that love which constitutes his own essence, and made 
him more than other men — a living soul. Burns was great 
by the greatness of his sympathies — sympathies acute and del- 
icate, yet large, comprehensive, boundless. They were warm- 
est and strongest toward those of his own kind, yet they 
overflowed upon all sentient beings — npon the animals in his 
stall, upon the "wee, sleekit, covverin', timorous beastie" dis- 
lodged from her autumnal covert; upon the hare wouuded by 
the sportsman ; upon the very field flower overturned by his 
share and crushed among the stubble. And in all this we feel 
that there is nothing strained or exaggerated, nothing affected 
or put on, nothing childish or silly, but that all is true, gen- 
uine, healthy, manly, noble ; we honor, we venerate the poet 
while we read ; we take the expression of these sympathies to 
our hearts, and fold it in our memory forever. 

And now, having said all I purposed to say — to your weari- 
ness, I fear — I proceed to give out the first regular toast, a 
toast in which if you do not heartily join, I shall wonder why 
you are here. 

When the applause elicited by Mr. Bryant's remarks had 
subsided, he announced the first regular toast : 

The Day u'e Celebrate — A day " which makes the whole world kin" — 
uniting by sympathetic emotion men of all degrees, in every land, in 
honoring the memory and the genius of Robert Burns — one of "the 
few, the immortal names that were not born to die." 

Jfusic hy the Band — " Auld Lang Syne." 



58 



BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 



SPEECH OF JAMES T. BRADY. 

Mr. Brady rose to respond auiid enthusiastic cheering, and 
spoke as follows : 

Mr. President and Gentlemen : — In a land which, at 
the decease of Burns, was comparatively a wilderness — in a 
nation then an infant — w^e meet this night to commemorate his 
greatness, and render homage to his memory. The natives of 
many climes surround this festal board. Here and now 
national and individual antipathies are banished, that we may 
vie with each other in honor of a genius which has alike 
delighted and illumined the human race. We celebrate a day 
not memorable for the progress or prowess of physical force — 
not encrimsoned on the historic page by records of blood — 
not made stately by the advent or triumph of boasted lineage 
— nor associated with the insignia or trappings of worldly 
pomp or powder. We are at the altar of Poetry — we stand 
beside one of what Halleck calls 

"Shrines, to no creed nor code confined, 
The Delphian Vales — the Palestines — 
The Meccas of the mind." 

The cheerful liquids which furnish our inspiration may well be 

employed on such an occasion. The great poet we are here to 

honor has said, 

"When neeburs anger at a plea, 
An' just as wild as wud can be. 
How easy can the barley bree 

Cement the quarrel ! 
It's aye the cheapest lawyer's fee. 
To tasche the barrel." 



Concurring with you in this sentiment, and thanking your 
Committee for enabling me to meet the sons of Scotia, I shall 



THE CENTENARY FESTIVAL. 59 



say a few words of liim whose iininortal lines hav^e given glory 
to the name and history of his native land. A fine writer has 
remarked that, although genius is the heir of fame, the loss of 
life is the condition on which the bright reversion must be 
earned — that fame is the recompense, not of the living, but 
of the dead — its temple standing over the grave, and the flame 
of its altar kindled from the ashes of the great. Hazlitt tells 
us that fame is " the spirit of a man surviving himself," and 
describes it, further, as " the sound which the stream of high 
thoughts carries down to future ages, making, as it flows, dee]), 
distant murmuring, evermore, like the waters of the mighty 
ocean." Such fame attends the career of him whom genius 
illumines. That divine principle, moving over the earth, often 
sends its fitful but brilliant gleam to establish a holy and im- 
mortal temple, where the humble object of its lustre seemed 
destined for perpetual obscurity. It turns aside capriciously 
from the pi-oud turrets and gorgeous display of wealth and 
station, to consecrate foi'ever a lowly cot in Stratford-on-Avon, 
or by the banks of bonnie Doon. The achievements and the 
distinction of the mightiest rulers pale in their lustre when 
compared with the intellectual radiations of a Shakspeare or 
a Burns. Think of the poor home where, one hundred years 
ago. Burns was born — that home which, within the first week 
of his existence, gave way before the pitiless storm, as if the 
very elements were resolved that its narrow limits should not 
contain the infant form of him whose ftime was destined to fill 
a world. As Carlyle says, " There arose, among those second- 
hand acting figures — tnimes for most part of the eighteenth 
century — once more a giant original man ; one of those men 
who reach down to perennial deeps, who take rank with the 
heroic among men ; and he was born in a poor Ayrshire hut." 
Worthy tribute from one great Scotsman to another. We find 



60 BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBKATION. 

tliis humble boy intent npon tlie life of Hannibal, and tlie 

history of Sir William Wallace, the books which, he tells us, 

most captivated his youthful mind. We see him walk many 

miles to the Leglin Ward, the scene of Wallace's rest, " with 

as much devout euthusiasm as ever pilgrim did to the Loretto." 

The poor peasant had even then within him the feeble but 

struggling hope that his own achievements might one day 

make his own tomb the object of pilgrim devotion. Already 

he murmured within himself what afterward he pronounced, 

as follows : 

"That I, for poor auld Scotland's sake, 
Some useful plan, or BeuTc could make, 
Or sing a song at least." 

The ambition which prompted this aspiration enriched the 
world with the spirit-stirring lyric, " Scots wha hae wi Wallace 
bled," and that genial greeting, " Auld Lang Syne." We 
trace our hero to the early intellectual guidance of an old 
woman, of whom he says, " She had, I suppose, the largest 
collection in the countrj^ of tales and songs, concerning devils, 
ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, 
elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantrips, giatits, 
enchanted towers, dragons, and other trumpery." Little did 
the gude auld wife imagine that she was furnishing her young 
pupil with the material for " Halloween" and "Tam O'Shanter" 
— to say nothing of " Souter Johnnie" and the "Devil and 
Doctor Llornbook." The great power of his mind was already 
fashioning into shapes of poetic beauty and interest the con- 
fused material of the dame's rude teaching. Images destined 
to be eternized were already fixing themselves on the young 
poet's eye, of which we may indeed say, that it was even then 
" in a fine phrenzy rolling" — that large, dark eye, in which 
Prof. Walker said " the most striking index of his genius 



THE CENTENARY FESTIVAL. 61 



resided," and to which Sir Walter Scott aUudes thus : " I never 
saw such another eye in a human head, though I have seen the 
most distinguished men of my time." It was a mischievous 
eye, as she might have told us, whom the poet at the age of 
sixteen — when his thoughts first chrystalized in verse — called 
" a bonnie, sweet, sonsie lass" — the eye that admitted from the 
bright orbs of Mary Campbell the influences which, when God 
had called her from earth, made her seem to him as the lines 
to " Highland Mary" make her appear to us. That an ardent 
and too general passion for women stirred in his heart, and 
marred, to some degree, the prosperity of his life, was known 
to none better than himself, as we may infer from the lines 
suggesting a Poet's epitaph, in which he says : 



■ The poor inhabitant below 
Was quick to leai'n, and wise to know, 
And keenly felt the friendly glow, 

And softer flame ; 
But thoughtless follies laid him low. 

And stained his name." 



We follow, with profound interest, the career of this earnest, 
ambitious, proud young bard, who looked without favor upon 
the rank which was but " the guinea-stamp," feeling all the 
while " the man's the gowd." We hear him, in allusion to the 
greater progress and success of his compeers and school-fellows, 
exclaim, as he referred to their advance: "I was standing idle 
in the market-place, or only left the cliase of the butterfly from 
flower to flower to hunt fancy from whim to whim." There lie 
stood, somewhat aloof from the world, acting on what Dr. 
Johnson called his " defensive pride." But the world had an 
ear and heart open to notes attuned in the deep melodies of 
nature. And when the images of truth were painted by him 
in the language of truth— when he re-produced the sentiments, 



G2 BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 

passions and feelings of our nature — he " attained his pinnacle 
by one gigantic bound." Even at the moment when he con- 
templated becoming an exile from his native land, his poems 
commanded the universal admiration of his countrymen. The 
learned professor and the humble ostler alike delighted in his 
lines, and gloried in his triumph. From the first avails of his 
success, he erected a tomb over the neglected remains of his 
brother-poet, Ferguson. Hov^ eventful, checkered, imprudent, 
and yet brilliant, his career, up to the time, in 1796, when we 
find Jiim in " sickness, sorrow, and debt," at Dumfries, under- 
going his last illness, not, as we are told, "with tlie ostentation 
of philosophy, but with firmness as well as feeling ;" main- 
taining, too, the undying capacity for humor, which developed 
itself even at that solemn period, when, thinking of the Dum- 
fries Volunteers, to which corps he belonged, he remarked to a 
friend : " John, don't let that awkward squad fire over me." 
We are told that, while he was dying, his home was "like a 
besieged place." The interest in his fate w^as intense. He 
died. The conqueror of hearts died. And in what state was 
his cold form exhibited? "Fie lay," says Allan Cunningham, 
" in a plain and unadorned coffin, with a linen sheet drawn 
over his face, and, on the bed and around the body, herbs and 
flowers were thickly strewn, according to the usage of the 
country. He was wasted somewhat by long illness ; but death 
had not increased the swarthy hue of his face, which was un- 
commonly dark and deeply marked — his broad and open brow 
was pale and serene, and around it his sable hair lay in masses, 
slightly touched with gray. The room where he lay was plain 
and neat, and the simplicity of the poet's humble dwelling 
pressed the presence of death more closely on the heart than if 
his bier had been embellished by vanity, and covered with the 
blazonry of high ancestry and rank." Thousands of his coun- 



THE CENTENARY FESTIVAL. 63 



trymen flocked to his funeral, and he was deposited in an 
humble sepulture, whence, in 1815, his remains were trans- 
ferred to a mausoleum, inscribed with an epitaph far more 
learned, but not so expressive as that which I have already 
recited. The struggle of this man's personal life was a severe 
one. Poverty, wounded pride, remorse, all pursued him. He 
was indeed of that class mentioned by Shelley, who " learn in 
suftering what they teach in song." Well might Mrs. Hemans 
compare the struggles of such a poet, who sets bright gems 
upon the brow of humanity, with those of the pearl diver : 



" And who shall think, when the strain is sung 
Till a thousand hearts are stirred, 
What life-drops, from the minstrel wrung. 
Have gushed with every word? 



"None! None! His treasures live, like thine. 
He strives and dies, like thee — 
Thou that has been to the pearl's dark shrine, 
Thou wrestler of the sea." 



Not quite so gloomy or sad the career or destiny of Burns. 
He enjoyed his fame even while he lived, and died with a full 
conviction that his name would, as it will, be cherished while 
that of his country remained. Like the Welsh bards of old, 
he stood, as they, when they assembled " in the face of the sun 
and the eye of light." With all that belongs to nature, he had 
real sympathy, and for all his sympathy found truthful and 
eloquent expression. The mountain daisy, the homeless mouse, 
the wounded hare, the meanest creature of earth, could excite 
his feeling and awaken his genius. Whatever were his faults, 
they injured himself most. To those who think of these 1 
would say, in his admirable verse : 



64: BUENS CENTENNIAL CELEBEATION. 



"Who made the heart, 'tis He alone 

Decidedly can try us ; 
He knows each chord, its various tone — 

Each spring, its various bias. 
Then at the balance let's be mute. 

We never can adjust it; 
What's done Ave partly may compute, 

But know not what's resisted." 



A century lias passed since bis birtli — a busy century, full 
of new and wondrous acbievements, and events. It bas no- 
ted many cbanges, important in tbemselves and tbeir conse- 
quences. Wbat bad been deemed imperisbable bas passed 
away ; wbat considered famous, become, in many instances, 
unknown. Iconoclasts, innovaters, reformers are busy all over 
tbe world. Even Kussia is breaking tbe cbains of serfdom. 
"Wbat some men call unrest is agitating tbe planet we inbabit. 
But tbe liglit and tbe power of true and beneficent genius, 
sucb as instructs and pleases man in bis peaceful and silent 
bours — tbese still abide. Tbe lustre of Burns's fame sbines 
unalterably, even like that of tbe stars. Tacitus and Sallust 
are renowned as historians ; but w^e can never feel certain tbat 
tbey wxre not more loyal to tbeir patrons tban to veracity. 
Not so with Burns. Tbe poet is a man of at least three ex- 
istences ; one is a tribute to duty, another to society, tbe third 
to his inspiration, Lockbart, Wordsworth, Sir Walter Scott, 
have memorialized Burns in tbe Old World. American poets 
have rejoiced to do him justice. One of these presides hei'e 
to-night, toward whom, as a poet, I may not say wbat tbe fu- 
ture will certainly utter; but I claim the privilege of repeat- 
ing some lines from one usually denominated the " Quaker 
Poet," whom I could not admire if, like the presiding officer 
of this assemblage, he did not sympathize with human free- 
dom in all its forms and conditions. Jolm G. Whittier has 



THE CENTENNIAL FESTIVAL. 65 



adorned his own character, and tlie hero of tliis liour, by 
exchiiining : 

" Let those who never erred, forget 
His worth in vain bewailings ; 
Sweet soul of song ! I own my debt 
Uncancelled by his failings. 



Lament, who will, the ribald line 
Which tells his lapse from duty — 

How kissed the maddening lips of wine. 
Or wanton ones of beauty : 



But think, while falls that shade between 

The erring one and Heaven, 
That he who loved like Magdalen, 

Like her may be forgiven. 



Not his the song whose thund'rous chime 

Eternal echoes render — 
The mournful Tuscan's haunted rhyme, 

Or Milton's starry splendor! 



But who his human heart has laid 
To Nature's bosom nearer ? 

Who sweetened toil like him, or paid 
To love a tribute dearer ? 



"Through all his tuneful heart, how strong 
The human feeling gushes ! 
The very moonlight of his song. 
Is warm with smiles and blushes ! 



" Grive lettered pomp to tooth of Time, 
So ' Bonnie Doon ' but tarry : 
Blot out the Epic's stately I'hyme — 
But spare his ' Highland Mary!' " 

Mr. Brady's remarks were greeted witli vehement applause 

throughout ; after which the following song, written for the 

occasion, was sung by Mr, William Park : 
9 




Scots, whci'e'er your homes may stand, 
Ne'er forget your native land ; 
Meet this day in friendly band — 
Drink his memory. 



He who lived and loved and sung, 
Scotia's hills and glens among : 
He whose harp, so true, hath rung 
For humanity. 

Spread the board with highland cheer, — 
Sing the lays to Scotland deai% — 
Fill the glass : we'i-e brothers here, — 
Drink to Robert Burns. 

'Tis the day that marks his birth. 
Bard of Scotland's heart and hearth ; 
Meet ye then, o'er all the earth. 
As this day returns. 

Here's to all he loved so well, 
Manhood's truth and beauty's spell, 
Fatherland, its hill and dell. 
Pledge we in his name. 

Here's to Burns : fill high ! fill high I 
Drink till every glass is dry : 
Memory's tear in every eye 
Keepeth fresh his fame. 

The Honorary Chairman then announced the second regu- 
lar toast : 



The Genius of Burns. — Risen above the dust and clouds of earthly 
frailty and misfortune, it shines, a fixed star in the heavens, and sings 
as it shines, to cheer the heart of friendship and love, mercy and truth, 
liberty and humanity ; an hundred years are proof that its light belongs 



THE CENTENARY FESTIVAL. 67 

not only to his own day, but to all time ; and not only to Scotland, but to 
mankind. 

Music — "Ye banks and braes o' bonnie Doon." 

Ilev\ Samuel Osgood rose to respond. 

SPEECH OF REV. MR. OSGOOD. 

The subject given me by this sentiment, Mr. President, has 
one fault, as uncommon as it is weighty. It is the fault of 
being too good, so good that it s})eaks too well for itself to 
need any thing to be said for it. Surely the genius of Burns 
has sung itself into the human heart ; and if any man questions 
its quality, the best answer to the question is a strain of the 
poet's own music — that will be quite sure to set the doubter 
himself singing in nnison. But good as the topic is of itself, 
without any added words, I am in for a speech ; and my great 
hope is that the man, with the occasion, may give a little in- 
spiration to lips not claiming the " faculty divine," as the 
touch o'l a master hand gives life to the pipes of the organ, and 
wrings melody from dull lead and wood. Upon this principle, 
it may not be presumptuous in me to speak here to-night ; and 
if your presence, honored sir, in the Chair, might call for 
modest silence from others upon that gentle art poetic, in 
whicli you are our master, why may not this fact work quite 
the other way, and lead a poor proser to hope that he may 
catch a little of your fire by sitting near enough to the Chair 
to feel the electric spark from that direction. Although 
wooden tables may not venture, as they are said to do, to 
move and talk under the action of departed spirits, surely our 
heads must be worse than wooden if we are not mediums now, 
and our brains are not entranced, and our tongues are not 



68 



BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 



electrified by the spell of this hour, when the voice of Bryant 
calls on us to commune with the spirit of Burns. 

The sentiment, sir, says that the genius of Burns belongs not 
only to Scotland, but to mankind. Whether mankind really 
owns the property or not, it is very clear that it has taken pos- 
session, and does not mean to let go. We have got the poet 
by heart, and we mean to keep him there. If Scotland has 
him, we have him, too ; and if she tries, as she will not do, to 
keep him to herself, she cannot show her treasure without 
renouncing her monopoly, or without opening her coffer to the 
nations, and so giving to every one that hath an eye or an ear, 
a gift in its own nature of universal meaning and worth, those 
words, winged as doves, and precious as " apples of gold in 
pictures of silver." As well try to make private property of a 
star in heaven, as of a bright genius ; for genius, like the stars, 
belongs to every eye that sees it, and all own the light who 
walk in its shining. What better proves that this bard belongs 
to us all, than tliis occasion itself? We meet here, men of 
every trade, profession, country, and creed, to keep this festival 
of a ploughman's birth ; and whilst we hold our genial fellow- 
ship together, we catch thrills of kindred feeling from brethren 
in all the great American cities, whose greetings come flashing 
along the electric wires ; and, perhaps, before the night is 
through, the Atlantic Cable may wake up at the thrill of so 
many harp-strings — nay, make one string in the great harpsi- 
chord of the nations. The silent De Santy may bring to us, 
through the cold bed of the ocean, some pulses of the heart of 
old Scotland, that shall make us, here on tlie banks of the 
Hudson, brothers all with the poet's own countrymen, now met 
on the Frith of Forth, by the waters of the Tweed, and the 
banks and braes of bonnie Doon. In fact, no literary festival 
that ever took place on earth, probably, had so broad an 



to 



THE CENTENARY FESTIVAL. 69 

interest as this ; and over the whole globe, wlierever our 
tongue is spoken, or British or American institutions are known 
there will be some genial souls to speak tenderly with us the 
great minstrel's name. If the drum-beat of Britain circles the 
world continually, and the sunrise in every longitude is saluted 
by the reveille of her armies and fleets, who shall tell the 
circle of the heart-beat of her language — our language, as 
well as hers? Wherever that great heart beats this night, its 
blood quickens at the name of Robert Burns. The drums of 
the two great empires have not always, as now, sounded peace- 
ful notes to each other ; but in the heart-beat of to-night there 
is no jarring, either in remembrance or anticipation. 

New York, surely, has rightly her part in this great festival ; 
and no where this side of the Atlantic has Scotland so many 
sons and friends as here. The poet himself once thought of 
this city, and in his lines, " When Guilford good our pilot 
stood," gives a hint of our present occuj)ation : 

Poor Tammy Gage, within a cage, 

Was kept at Boston lia', man. 
Till Willie Howe took o'er the knowe 

To Philadelphia, man ; 
Wi' sword and gun he thought a sin, 

Guid Christian blood to draw, man ; 
But at New York, wi' knife and fork. 

Sirloin he hacked sma', man. 

But, Mr. President, I must not slight my mission, nor fail to 
say something of the poet's genius. What genius is, it is hard 
to define ; and even the men that have most of it do not 
always seem to know what it is. A Yankee ought to be good 
at guessing; and, as a full-blooded one, of the Bunker-Hill 
breed, I will venture to guess that genius is that which makes 
a man see into the soul of things, and makes others see into 
them. There is genius in every sphere of thought and action, 



70 BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 

from constructing steam-engines to commanding armies — from 
calculating eclipses to composing symphonies. But, whatever 
the sphere, we expect a man of genius to see into the matter in 
question, and so to shape the matter by his own mind that 
others also may see into it. Poetic genius is that which en- 
ables the possessor to see feelingly the soul of things, and so 
to make them over in thought and w^ord that others, too, may 
see. Thus the poet, as the name denotes, is a " maker" — a 
"seer," indeed, but also a "maker" — making the real life of 
things to be visibly seen by his art. A true poem is a living 
work, and its art brings out the life of the indwelling and 
overruling spirit, as trees and flowers bring out the life of 
nature. Such genius, of coui'se, is a native gift — born, not 
made; to be nurtured, indeed, by education, but created, not 
by man's art, but by God's power. It is at once a sense and 
a force ; a " vision and a faculty divine ;" a gift of seeing and 
of shaping ; and, like all senses and all forces, it is to be traced 
to native organization. It woi'ks from within outward, with 
spontaneous life, and, unlike mere talent, it takes its possessor 
quite as much by surprise as it does the world ; so that its 
best products are more involuntary births than labored manu- 
factures ; and when most carefully elaborated, the labor is 
more upon the dress than upon the body of the creation. In 
this sense Burns was a genius ; and as soon as he could see 
and think for himself, he felt and betrayed the secret of his 
gift. It mattered little what he looked upon; he saw the soul 
in it, and made it speak its soul to others ; and under his eye, 
the daisy or the mouse beneath his ploughshare M'a& more 
eloquent than the Alps or the Oceans are to men of common 
mould. The characteristics of his genius I need not undertake 
to describe minutely, after such masters in criticism as Carlyle 
and Lockhart have gone over the fleld. Following a simpler 



THE CENTENARY FESTIVAL. 71 



philosophy of criticism than theirs, let us say that Burns's 
genius was quite as remarkable for its susceptibility as for its 
power, and that he was at once mastered by his subject and 
master of it. His sense was alike genial and clear, alive to 
every aspect of truth. His will was earnest and manly, eager 
to follow every hint of nature and humanity — determined to 
speak out his downright convictions in his words. So he had 
both kinds of genius — that which is mastered by a subject, or 
surrenders itself to external influences, and also that which 
masters a subject and makes it speak out the poet's own man- 
hood. 

In this he is more of a poet than his great countryman Scott, 
who is so absorbed by his theme as to lose his own personality, 
and so became the minstrel of the old ages instead of the hero 
of the new age. Burns was both minstrel and hero ; and his 
best poems, while they may rehearse old times, are shaping the 
new times, and not only singing songs, but striking blows for 
the days of liberty and humanity that are to come. It is this 
manly earnestness, together with his tender sensibility, that 
makes Burns the people's poet ; and they love him, not only 
because he feels for their sorrows and with their joys, but 
because he believed in making the sorrows less, and the joys 
more. With all his frailties, his genius was heroic as it was 
tender, manly as it was womanly ; and something of the blood 
of Bruce and Wallace, that he celebrated in his verse, beat in 
the poet's own fiery veins. In his earnest manhood, and 
feminine tenderness, he deserves to be named in the same 
breath with his brother bard, who was born the same year 
with himself — Friedrich Schiller. Heaven, surely, was bounti- 
ful one hundred years ago, in sending to the banks of the 
Neckar and the Ayr two such souls as Schiller and Burns. In 
both. Poetry gained a genius, and Liberty a prophet. We 



72 BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 

speak their names together to-night ; together they will live in 
the ages, and sing into brotherhood the tongues and nations 
which they represent. 

Look now a moment at the fruits of his genius, and consider 
their form and their substance. The form of a man's thought 
has much to do with expressing its nature and shaping its 
power. With Burns, the form was not a costume put upon his 
thought, but a life outspoken. He spoke as he was moved, 
without pedantry or aii'ectation, and the familiar airs and 
homely language of his people won new melody and eloquence 
upon his lijjs. He did not study versification in grammars 
and rhetoric, but listened to the airs of old Scotland, that 
seemed part of the breath of the nation ; and he gave back 
these airs enriched with his own precious thought and senti- 
ment, as some spice-island welcomes the rude sea-breezes to its 
aromatic groves, and wafts them away, no longer common air, 
but fragrant as Araby the Blest. He did not hunt the dic- 
tionaries for high-sounding words, nor the classics for stately 
sentences ; but spoke his mind in the plain language of his 
farming neighbors, and found that common speech was more 
full of vitality and beauty than any scholastic dialect, even as 
the common earth yields more blossom and fruit than the 
pavements of polished marble, though inlaid with mosaics. 
So he formed his matchless style — or, rather, so he let his style 
grow — and the sincerity and force of his genius spoke itself 
out in his word. 

The substance of his works corresponds with the form, and 
is to be found in every line that comes in earnest from his pen. 
He every where shows the same gentle, brave heart ; the same 
clear, manly sense at work to bring us nearer to nature and to 
man — sometimes nearer to God. How marvelous is his natur- 
alness ! I refer not now so much to his wonderful naturalness 



THE CENTENARY FESTIVAL. 73 



in language as in liis thouglit. The tradition is, that St, Francis, 
the begging saint, was taught by a miracle the language of 
irrational creatures, and could converse with flowers and ani- 
mals. But we need no tradition to reveal to us this gift in our 
poet. He talks to nature as a friend, and as such she answers 
him ; and river, and mountain, flower, bird, and beast, that to 
so many have a dead language, or a dumb cipher, spoke to him 
their mother tongue. His favorite flowers chat with him like 
children — the daisy, the harebell, and the sweet-briar — ^while 
the Doon and Ayr, in the swell and cadence of their flowing 
waters, sing to him of the light of by-gone days, like old 
friends ; and the Highland hills stand up before him like min- 
istering priests of God, lifting up to heaven the solenm litanies 
of ages. The animals talked to him and through him in a mar- 
velous way ; and what he has said of the mouse, the dogs, the 
old mare, the old sheep, the wounded hare, brings the brute 
creatures nearer our hearts, and preaches, trumpet-tongued, 
that neglected part of the Gospel — mercy to the races below us. 
Remember that mercy. Remember here to-night, that he who 
pains, without reason, any dumb creature, is no brother to 
Robert Burns. 

And what aspect of humanity has not been illustrated by his 
pathos or humor, his keen wit or stout manhood ? Do we speak 
of friendship ? — read the Elegy on Glencairn, or sing " Auld 
Lang Syne." Is love the theme ? — without referring to those 
passages in the Poet's life, when he, like too many of us, was 
a tinder box before the flashes of every new bright eye, and 
yielded to the failing which since father Adam's time has been 
somewhat chronic with the whole race — own that reverence for 
woman that runs through all his best romantic songs, and rises 
into religious solemnity in his "Cotter's Saturday Night." No 

nobler tribute to wedded love need be paid than in the good 
10 



74 BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 

old song, " John Anderson," whicli sings, in its homely way, 
the blessed truth tliat home happiness should brighten with 
years, and they whom God hath joined together are dearer far 
as time purges away earthly lusts, and transfigures human 
affections in the love that is divine and has promise of eternity. 
In other pieces, as in that to "Mary in Heaven," there is a 
devout tenderness that mates him with Dante, the great father 
of modern literature, who found heavenly purity in a gentle 
maiden's eyes, and in his sadder and riper years was led in 
solemn vision by her seraphic spirit above the empyrean to 
the eternal throne. Who shall describe his service to patriot- 
ism, or say too much of that love of country that glows in his 
" Farewell to Scotland" and his " Bruce's Address at Bannock- 
burn ? " Where Scotch blood beats, those words of Bruce are 
a living power. In them Burns has done better service on the 
field than in the " awkward squad " of Dumfries Volunteers. 
In those words he fought among the Scotch Greys at Waterloo, 
and marched to the relief of Lucknow. The pibroch, sounding 
through the defiles of the hills of India, that spoke hope and life 
to the beleaguered garrison, in its wild wailing and brave cheer, 
bore upon its breath more than a remembrance of the pathos and 
the courage of the Highlanders' Master Bard. Kor was the 
great sentiment of humanity less favored by his muse. His 
famous song, " A Man's a Man for a' that," is the Declaration 
of Independence set to music, and is this night sung round the 
w^orld. Some there may be Avho question his claim to be 
thought a friend to humanity in its spiritual aspects, but which 
of us can, in justice, deny his title to religious sentiment, or 
will maintain that, in his best hours, he was a stranger to 
divine faith? Will not the Cotter's Saturday Night plead for 
piety and purity ages after the author's personal frailties are 
forgotten ? And what youth can read his poetic letter of 1786 



THE CENTENARY FESTIVAL. Y5 

to a young friend, and not call the bard the earnest moralist 
as well as the genial companion ? Snch sentences as these are 
no scoffer's words : 

"An Atheist's laugh 's a poor exchange 
For Deity ofFeuded." 



And, again. 



■ A correspondence fixed wi' Heaven, 
Is sure a noble anchor." 



Thus, and in passages without number, might we show the 
real humanity of our poet in its broad and vital relations with 
nature, man, and God. We might show that, however limited 
in the quantity of his works, and in this respect inferior to the 
great poets before his day, in respect to the quality of his 
genius he has claims to be named with any of them. What 
he might have done if long life, better discipline, and more 
congenial circumstances had been granted him, we cannot tell ; 
but sure we are that, in the great characteristics of native 
genius, what he did places him among the great poets of 
hum.anity. He looked upon nature with Homer's clear, open 
eyes, and into the heart of man with Shakspeare's divining 
sagacity. He shows us glimpses of Dante's weird diablerie, 
with much of his more than chivalrous tenderness; whilst in 
the power of transition from pathos to humor, and from deep- 
est melancholy to gayest joy, the author of " Man was made 
to mourn," and the " Ode to liuin," " Tam O'Shanter," " The 
Jolly Beggars," and " My Heart's in the Highlands," need not 
ask favor from the greatest admirers of the author of " L'Al- 
legro" and "11 Penseroso." This high estimate of the 
quality of his genius implies no fulsome eulogy of the man, 
but rather deepens our regret at the fatal errors that brought 



76 



BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 



liim to a premature grave, and blasted his power in its 
meridian. 

Time, however, is the true test of genius, and in its mighty- 
crucible purges away the dross, to preserve the true gold. A 
century is time enough to separate wliatever is merely private 
or individual in a man, from what is universal or human. 
The genius of Burns is now put to this test, and we are look- 
ing to see what remains of him now that his private fortunes 
are not our concern, but we treat rather his place in the world 
of humanity. What relates merely to the individual as such, 
or merely to the stomach and pockets, does not belong to the 
race, and, unless connected with higher interests, goes into the 
grave with the dust of the body. Too many men, according 
to this principle, leave nothing behind them, and, living for 
themselves, would seem, but for the light of a holy faith, 
doomed to perish — mere digesters of food and gatherers of 
gold. But the true man lives in things universal ; and when 
he dies, the undying humanity to which he belongs will not 
let him drop into oblivion. Thus Burns lives in that humanity 
which he claimed as his own, and quickened and exalted by 
his thought and word. 

His genius belongs to humanity, and without the aid of titled 
patrons or voting senates academical, it has taken its place in 
the great temple of letters by the same law that lifts the oak 
above the bramble, and moves the spheres, each in its orbit. 
There he is, and there he will stay. The genius, whose fragile 
home, one hundred years ago, when he was a few days old, was 
blown down in a tempest, now dwells among the Masters of 
Song, within walls of remembrance that no storm can shake, 
no floods wash away. 

He was a Providential man, and had a mission, especially to 
his own ao^e as well as to all time. He was born, and lived in 



THE CENTENARY FESTIVAL, Y7 

a memorable century — the age in which tlie old tyrannies and 
the new liberties struggled together, as never before or since. 
Two years before he was born, a gifted and marvelous man in 
the north of Europe, alike a philosopher and a devotee, had a 
vision of the immediate end of the old world, and the forming 
of the new age, with its throne of judgment and signs of spir- 
itual power. Whatever we may think of his dreams or marvels, 
Swedenborg was right in his thought, and the new world was 
surely in its birth-throes. The life of the common people was 
to be moved as never before, since the Christian era began ; and 
soldiers, statesmen, scholars, and poets were now to have new 
work to do, and new topics to treat. What a spell there is 
upon our memory to-night, as we listen to this music that binds 
the years together, and brings before us, as in one great drama, 
the century that now strikes the hour upon the dial of ages, 
1759 — 1859. Who shall describe, or even comprehend, the 
men and events of that interval ? Yet there is method in the 
madness, even of revolutions; and the facts of the century turn 
with considerable unity upon a single point — the struggle of 
popular liberty with chartered monopolies, the conflict between 
freedom and tyranny. From the struggle. Providence has been 
leading humanity to new triumphs in spite of either class of 
destructives, the despots and the anarchists. Autocrats and 
mobocrats swarm before us in fearful procession, as we contem- 
plate that time of conflicting powers and opinions. I^ow that 
the thick of the battle is over, the issue is somewhat clear to 
us, and we see, on the one side, such autocrats as the Louises, 
Alexanders, and NajDoleons, with their priestly advisers ; and 
on the other side, such mobocrats as the Robespierres and 
Marats, with their counsellors more steeped in Atheism and 
Materialism than they. Between the two ranks stand the cham- 
pions of constitutional liberty, under such leaders as Chatham 



78 BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 

and Bnrke, Washington and Franklin, and the great thinkers 
and antliors who have striven for a social order, humane and 
reverential. Among these men Robert Burns has a Providen- 
tial name and place, and he is one of the builders of the new 
civilization of freedom and humanity. While men were dis- 
puting whether there was any human soul and human right, 
and Atheism was wrangling with ghostly priestcraft, and meet- 
ing blind credulity w^ith as blind unbelief, the Scotch plough- 
man came into the field of debate with his songs of liberty and 
humanity, and taught the people by heart that there is more 
mind in man than the schools teach him, and a worth, too, that 
kings cannot make nor mobs unmake. Though not a theolo- 
gian, he belongs to the teachers of positive faith ; and as his 
countryman, Thomas Reid, by his Philosophy of Comrtion 
Se)ise, rebuked the prevailing intellectual scepticism that was 
making men into materialists. Burns by his poetic fire did the 
same good work for the Anglo-Saxon people, and set the phi- 
losophy of common sense to music. He is one of the great 
teachers of the belief now so vital and so mighty in public 
opinion — that there is something in man more than what 
schooling puts into him, and that the greatest of all wrongs is 
to crush down the rights and instincts of a human soul. 

He sang this principle of the great creed of humanity to 
moody umltitudes almost ripe for bloodshed, and at his word 
they yielded their madness for mercy, as Saul of old was re- 
freshed by David's harp, and was well. In giving the Anglo- 
Saxon race the love of liberty without anarchy, and bringing 
into social and civil life a brave and genial sense of right, 
Robert Burns was a servant of Providence. He felt within 
himself the life of the new humanity, and spoke it out even 
more deeply and eloquently than he knew. The world's field 
was ready for the great harvest ; and from whose lips came the 



THE CENTENARY FESTIVAL, 79 

cheering notes of its spring-time more than from that peasant 
poet — that spring-bird of the better year of promise and fruit? 
Now that the great problem of the century is, in a measure, 
solved, so far as first principles are concerned, we can see the 
poet's Providential work, and now in our own vision of liberty 
we hear that ploughman's voice in the songs of liberty that 
are sounding through tlie world, and quickening anew the 
manhood that kindled at Chatham's eloquence, and fought 
under Washington's standard. He is the poet of common 
humanity. His notes were, indeed, often merry, and some- 
times trifling; but his great songs are marches, not dancing 
tunes, and by their cheering music our humanity has marched 
on more stoutly its appointed way. Plonor, then, to the genius 
of Burns ! He was not ashamed of us in our common nature 
with all its homeliness and care. In Heaven's name let us not 
be ashamed of him. Pity — much pity for the man — pity for 
him who pitied every creature, from the little mouse to the 
great devil, that imp of darkness, Auld Nickie Ben himself! 
But no pity for his genius, so imperial as to demand our hom- 
age, and clothe us with its purple and gold ! It is God's gift 
to us, and in common with all like gifts of Providential minds, 
it proves our birth-right to a domain beyond aught that we can 
make ourselves. We are great, brethren, not in ourselves alone, 
but in our race — in that humanity which God has given, and 
all ages are enriching, and which needs heaven, as well as 
earth, to hold its treasures. Under the spell of this great name, 
acknowledge to-night the common bond of humanity ; and as 
the same music that has charmed millions, now sweeps through 
this hall with its pathos and joy, let it touch within us the 
chord of brotherhood, leaving no human soul on earth or heaven 
out of the circle of its fellowship. Let its matchless humor 
charm us out of our too anxious cares, and let its frequent 



80 BUElSrS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 

sadness soothe rather than deepen our too ready dejection, by 
moving us to cure our griefs by relieving our neighbor's suffer- 
ings as we may. Thank God for the joy and the sorrow 
of Burns' song. Its joy declares that Sovereign Goodness is 
over us still, and its sorrow speaks not only of his own strug- 
gles, but of that still sad music of Humanity which tells us, if 
not that Paradise is lost, at least it is not yet won, and we have 
a long way to go, and a hard battle to light, before we strike 
our tents and ground our arms. Gratefully hear our poet's 
voice in the great company, to whose fraternity a century of 
years now seals his right, and let his voice sound with theirs. 
All our great poets are singing for us still, and the morning 
stars shall cease their song before those eternal melodies are 
hushed. 

Mr. President, I give a closing sentiment : 

The Poets of our Humanity — Glroat in what they have done — greater 
still in what they are to do for us. They not only charm our quiet hours, 
but nerve us to work and to wait for the good days coming, with a hand 
and heart of welcome to every friend of God and man in all time. 

The company manifested their appreciation of the power and 
eloquence of Mr. Osgood's speech by their earnest attention, 
broken only by impulsive bursts of applause, and he took his 
seat amid prolonged and enthusiastic cheering. 

Mr. George Shvipson then sang " Of a' the airts the wind can 
blaw," and being rapturously encored, gave " The Jolly Beg- 
gars," with great effect. 

Mr. Edward M. Archibald, the Honorary Yice-President, 
announced the third regular toast : 

Scotland — "We love our land because it is our own, 
And scorn to give another reason why." 

Music — " Here's a health, bonnie Scotland, to thee." 



THE CENTENARY FESTIVAL. 81 

Mr. Charles Gould was called on to respond. 

MR. Gould's speech. 

Mr. President and Gentlf:mex : ^o words are adequate to 
tell our admiration and veneration for the " land of the moun- 
tain and the flood ;" the land of chivalric honor and heroic 
courage ; a resting-place of freedom ; a home and a birth- 
place of virtue, and talents, and genius — virtue without a stain, 
talents unsurpassed in the wide range of history, and genius 
whose centennial we this night celebrate. 

Countries are known by what they are, and by what they 
have done. What Scotland is, and what she has done, the 
world knows by heart : and that little island claims as her 
children those who rank with the greatest and best of mankind. 
The mere catalogue is far too long for mention here. The 
array of Scotland's statesmen and heroes, men of science and 
martyrs, authors and poets, crowds the page of history. 
Woman has taken a proud stand there, and a century ago the 
authoress of "Auld Robin Gray" gave new sweetness to ballad 
literature. 

What Scott did in raising the standard of fiction — minoflins^ 
instruction and lessons of virtue with a natural narrative — 
Wilson, his great contemporary, did for periodical literature. 
The charming flow of pathos and humor, of wit and descriptive 
power, of sarcasm and of eloquence, which makes the Nootes 
AiiibrosiancB so loved and honored, has made the sayings of 
Christopher l^orth " familiar in our mouths as household 
words," and written him among " the few immortal names 
that were not born to die." 

Great in her heroes, great in her statesmen, great in her 

authors, greater in her great poet. Great as Scotland is in all 
U 



82 BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 



these, her children, she is greatest in the stand she took so long 
ago, and has since maintained so nobly, for freedom and for 
truth. Her martyr-heroes are a long cloud of witnesses, who 
accepted death rather than yield their high and stern principles 
of religious freedom and religious right ; and their successors 
in the sacred duties of piety have done their full part in making 
Scotland what she is. 

" From scenes like this old Scotia's grandeui* springs. 
That makes her loved at home, revered abroad." 

The central place of honor among Scotland's noble children 
we this night give — we always give — to Burns ; the genius, 
untaught in earthly schools, who caught his inspiration im- 
mediately from the Great Creator, and scattered the heaven- 
born gift like leaves from the tree of life, to bless his fellow 
men. 

True fifenius is an inexhaustible fountain of the beautiful 
and the good. Generation after generation w^U draw from 
Scotland's Great Poet, as we have done, ennobling emotions 
and great thoughts, and still there remains the overflowing 
supply; and generations unborn will come to the same glorious 
fountain, and drink, and bless the name and honor the memory 
of Robert Burns. 

"Nothing need coA^er his high fame but heaven ; 
No pyramids set oft" his memories, 
But the eternal substance of his greatness, 
To which I leave him !" 

Gentlemen of the Burns Club : It is a pleasure to you and to 
me to greet, on this proud centennial, the two great poets of 
America, presiding in pleasant fellowship over our pleasant 
festival. Bryant and Halleck : God bless you both, now and 
ever ! and when your centennial shall come, the lovers of 



THE CENTENARY FESTIVAL. 83 

Nature's Great Poet will love your memories and embalm your 
names. 

Mr. Andrew S. Eadie, Jr., then sang with spirit and effect, 
the song, " Scotland, I love thee." 

Mr. Joseph Laing, the First Vice President, announced the 
fourth regular toast, introducing it with a few appropriate re- 
marks; speaking of America as the land most loved and 
honored by Scotchmen, after their own. 

America — Where the (li<:^nity of self-p;()vernmeiit ennobles the humblest 
citizen, and the march of civilization is commensurate with the extent of 
territory ; while she studies to advance the one, the other can never be 
retarded. 

The toast was received with great enthusiasm and all the 
honors, 

Ifusie.—'' Yankee Doodle." 

Hon. D. F. TiEMANN, was expected to reply to this toast, 
but having been compelled to retire previous to its announce- 
ment, 

Hon. GuLiAN C. Yeeplanck responded. After appropriate 
reference to the toast, he alluded to the correspondence between 
Burns and Col. Ogden De Peyster, whose name was familiar 
to the speaker's ears, as that of a native !N^ew Yorker, and as 
the first New Yorker who did honor to the genius of Burns, 
He concluded by proposing the memory of Ogden De Peyster. 

3fusic. — " Star Spangled Banner." 

The Honorary Chairman then proposed the fifth toast : 

77«e Queen of Great Britain and the President of the United States. 

The announcement was received with peal on peal of enthu- 
siastic applause, amid which the band struck up " God save 



84 BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 

the Queen." Mr. Wm. Robertson then sang the anthem, with 
great spirit, the whole company rising and joining in the chorus. 
Mr. Edward M. Archibald being called on to respond, said : 
If he displayed any reluctance in responding to the call which 
had just been made upon him, it was because he yielded to it 
somewhat in derogation of a well-known rule by which the 
Queen's health is rarely if ever responded to. Hers was a 
name which could best answer for itself wherever it was pro- 
nounced. This was perhaps an occasion on which it might be 
fitting to make an exception. But indeed they had put upon 
him a hard task to speak in praise of one who was above all 
praise ; one wdio reigned supreme not alone over the liberties 
and fortunes, but in the hearts of all her subjects, and whose 
name was hailed with acclamations of profoundest respect 
wherever it was pronounced through the whole world ; one 
who, whether as a Queen, a wife, or a mother, commanded our 
highest admiration — our most heartfelt affection. To Scotch- 
men she should be doubly dear ; for, true to the Scottish 
blood in her veins, see how she loves yearly to revisit her 
Highland home — to tread the heather — and to wander by the 
romantic banks of the Tay and the Doon, rendered classic by 
the sweetest of Scotland's poets. See how she delights to 
clothe herself and her children in the tasteful hues of the 
Scottish garb, and to make herself familiar wuth the homely 
joys and destiny obscure of the humblest of her subjects. This 
day, wdiich was also the anniversary to her Majesty of an 
interesting domestic incident, would, he was sure, be celebrated 
by her in honor of Scotland's favorite bard, with not less fervor 
than by the veriest Scot in her wide-spread dominions. It was 
pleasing to see the name of their beloved Queen and that of 
the Chief Magistrate of this great country thus associated on 
such a day as this, when the hearts of the people of the two 



THE CENTENARY FESTIVAL. 85 

countries beat in harmony, and when they celebrated in nnison 
a poetic fame which was their common inheritance and their 
common property. What could he more do than, as the 
unworthy representative of her Majesty there that day, to 
thank them, as he did, from the bottom of his heart, for the 
honor with Mdiich, in this great city of the Western World, 
where she claimed no allegiance, they had received as they 
ever received the name of the Queen. Though he had no 
right or claim to speak on behalf of the President of the 
United States, he hoped it would not be considered presump- 
tuous in him to thank them also for the enthusiastic manner in 
which they had received the name of their worthy and able 
Chief Magistrate. 

Mr. Archibald was loudly applauded throughout, and re- 
sumed his seat amid great cheering. 

Music. — " Hail Columbia." 

Messrs. Benj. F. Miller and Geo. S. Haktt then gave the 
song " Huzza for Columbia," with great animation. 
The Cliairman next announced the sixth toast : 



Kindred Associations throughout the World — May thoy preserve the 
songs, and disseminate the sentiments of Burns, "till man and man, the 
warld o'er, shall brithers be, and a' that." 



[This toast had been dispatched to various parts of the 
United States and the Canadas, as the sentiment of the New 
York Burns Club, to be given simultaneously at 10 o'clock 
Xew York time, and had been read out of its order for that 
purpose ; but it is deemed proper to preserve the regular order 
in this report.] 



86 BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBKATION. 

The toast was received with great enthusiasm, the company 
rising and honoring it with nine cheers. 

Music. — " O, wat ye wha's in yon toan." 
Mr. Adam Nokkie responded. He said : 

Tlie Society over which I liave the honor to preside, is 
no doubt inchided in the last toast, and I beg leave to 
return most cordial thanks for the compliment to " Kindred 
Associations." It is trne that our society differs from yonrs 
in some important respects, having different objects in view, 
but they are in many respects kindred. They are kindred in 
blood, most of the members of both being of Scottish origin. 
They are kindred in a conmion attachment to "the land of the 
mountain and the flood," and above all, on this occasion, they 
are not only kindred but consentaneous in their admiration of 
the illustrious poet we are now assembled to honor — in this 
sentiment all are of one heart and one mind — the name of 
Burns awakens in all our hearts the same emotions of pride 
and admiration, and I rejoice in the privilege your kindness 
has afforded me of uniting in this grand celebration in honor 
of Scotia's greatest Bard. 

I well know from youthful and later experience, that there 
is no name like that of Burns to dissipate the Scotchman's 
native reserve and waken up the fervid enthusiasm which 
underlie^ the Scottish character. It cannot be otherwise, for 
his name is a household word in every Scottish home, from 
the theeket cottage to the stately castle. The nursery child 
listens to his songs, the brown-faced plowboy sings them as 
he treads the furrow, the pale mechanic mingles them with 
the hum of his daily labor, and they are joyfully welcomed 
in the halls and by the firesides of the wealthy and the culti- 



THE CENTENARY FESTIVAL. 



vated. Such is the endearing influence of this marvelous son 
of Genius and of Scotland ; such the immortality of the Ayr- 
shire Plowman. 

Is it not a wonderful thing, that after a century has passed 
since his birth, the name of a humble, untaught Ayrshire 
peasant, born to no inheritance but poverty, doomed to hard 
labor in his native fields, with no teacher but Nature, and no 
guide but that which the glorious soul within him provided, 
should be a spell to gather such an assembly as this, with the 
chieftain of American poets, a kindred genius, at its head ? — 
and not only here, but all over this wide continent, and in 
other lands, similar gatherings are held, to pay homage to our 
immortal bard. Little did Burns think, " when the poetic 
genius of his country found him, and threw her inspiring 
mantle over him," that after one hundred years he should not 
yet have reached the meridian of his fame, and that not only 
the land he loved so well, but other lands and other races 
should gather in crowds to do honor to his name. 

I wish. Sir, you had selected from among the distinguished 
gentlemen around me, representing other kindred associations, 
one of them, to reply to your last toast. Any of them would 
have done it more justice, while I can only claim an ecjuality 
with them in admiration of Burns, and in gratification in 
being permitted to enjoy the delight of this festival. In con- 
cluding, Sir, these few words of thanks, I venture to hope 
that I can in part compensate for the kindness of the Burns 
Club, by exliibiting for the examination of all j)resent, a very 
interesting relic of the great poet — namely, a lock of his hair, 
gathered by reverent hands from his tomb on the occasion of 
its being opened to receive the remains of his widow. I shall 
allow it to tell its own story, merely adding that I am indebted 
for the privilege of exhibiting it here, to the kindness of my 



BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 



esteemed friend, Mr. Dinwiddie, secretary to the St. Andrew's 
Society, who himself gathered it, at the Poet's grave, and who 
values it as a precious relic of departed worth and genius. 

[Mr. Richard Bell, of the St, Patrick's Society, handed 
round the hair. The " lock " is very small, and is incased in 
a neat double frame, with the following inscription :] 

ROBERT BURNS. 

On the decease of his widow, in the month of March, 1834, the mau- 
soleum of the poet, at Dumfries, was opened, and his skull exhumed, 
for the pui-pose of a cast being taken from it. The writer was one of 
the few persons who had the privilege of seeing the skull on that inter- 
esting occasion. He remembers it was in good preservation, and of 
unusually large size ; so much so, that it would not enter the writei-'s 
hat. * On cleaning the skull for the purpose in view, a small portion of 
hair was detached, of which the accompanying is a fragment. 

EoBT. Dinwiddie. 
New York, January, 1859. 

Mr. Wm. Robertson then sang the ever welcome song, "A 
man's a man for a' that," which was greeted with the usual 
enthusiasm. 

The Chairman then gave the seventh toast, which was duly 
honored. 



The Poets and Poelrj of Great Britain and Irdand — Sanctified in 
the past by the genius of a Shakspeare, a Burns, and a Moore — may 
their successors continue to advance the march of Intellect, of Civiliza- 
tion, and of Freedom. 



Music — " Brave old oak." 

Mr. "William Young, of the J^ew York Albion, responded. 



THE CENTENAKY FESTIVAL. 89 



MK. YOUNG s sPEi:cir. 

You have done well, Mr. Chairman, to introduce into your 
programme this tribute, at once so apt and so comprehensive. 
And you, gentlemen, have done well also in thus cordially re- 
ceiving it; for isolation is not part of the genuine poet's 
nature, and of all the race none was knit more closely than 
Robert Burns to men of his own vocation. Yon know, gentle- 
men, for you have conned over lovingly every published detail 
of his life, that Allan Ramsay's collection of songs Avas the 
varle-mectom of his laborious boyhood ; and that only six 
months before his death he spoke of Cowper's "Task" as a 
glorious poem, and of Peter Pindar as one of his first favor- 
ites. If to such as these he gave such honest welcome, how 
must his big heart have yearned toward the lofty ones to 
whom the toast alludes, and for whom I am expected to re- 
spond. 

But what response shall I make? — can I make? — I, who am 
no practised orator, and unable, therefore, even to understand 
that marvelous alacrity Avith which, in Parliament, in Con- 
gress, in thronged assemblage, men enunciate the rights or the 
wrongs of millions born or unborn, and appear, in fact, rather 
aided than impeded by the ponderous responsibilities that they 
shoulder. The greatness of the theme commended to my 
charge brings to me no such aid. I find its magnitude op- 
pressive, its variety perplexing. How shall I grapple Avith it 
as a whole — Avith Avhat portion of it come closely into con- 
tact ? Would you have me dilate upon the narrative of 
Chaucer, the I'oniance of Spenser, Shakspeare's drama, or 
Milton's epic? Or, coming down to more modern times, 

Avould you care to hear me enumerate the almost nuujberless 
12 



90 BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 



odes, that have been dedicated by brother folh^wers of the 
muse to the memory of the genius of Burns ? Shall I remind 
you of Byron's emphatic declaration that one of his most art- 
fully artless stanzas contained the essence of all the love-songs 
in the world ? Shall I labor to draw some far-fetched analogy, 
between the one poet whose fame we are met to celebrate, and 
the many whom you have just now associated with him in 
your libations ? l^o, gentlemen ; any such attempt would be 
alike wearisome and vain. It were superfluous to dwell upon 
the copiousness and the richness of British and Irish poetry, 
on the one hand ; on the other, upon the unquestionable fact, 
that all the poetic reach and wealth of the United Kingdom, 
from troubadours to corn-law rhymers, has failed to produce a 
counterpart, even a rival, to Robert Burns, in the precincts 
peculiarly his own. Besides, gentlemen, if your patience 
would tolerate the stringing together a host of illustrious 
names with which I might plead some familiarity, I should 
shrink, in the pz-esence of so many Scots, from affixing epithets 
to a Motherwell, a Tannahill, an Allan Cunningham, a Fergu- 
son ; nor less from marshaling in due order of precedence the 
Goldsmiths, the Dermodys, the Lovers, the Davises, dear all to 
a people of quick impulse and keen susceptibility. For these 
reasons, then — warranted also by the occasion and by this 
goodly presence — I prefer to invite you for one moment to the 
ground less familiarly trodden, nor exhausted, I think, by the 
eloquence of those who have preceded me. Keats was in the 
right of it, when he exclaimed : 

" Oh ! sweet Fancy ! Let her loose ; 
Evoiy thing is spoilt by use." 

You perceive my drift. Not that I would bid you imagine 
Burns' own ejaculation wrought out to the letter: 



THE CENTENARY FESTIVAL. 91 

" Oh, were I on Parnassus' hill, 
And had of Helicon my fill!" 

Nor that I would undertake to localize the favored spot, 
chanted by Wordsworth when a pilgrim to the banks of the 
Nith : 

"Where all that fetched the flowing rhyme, 
From genuine springs, 
Shall dwell together, till old Time 
Folds up his wings." 

Not this — not that ! Solely, I would ask you to figure to your- 
selves a conclave of disembodied spirits — of those, I mean, 
dead masters of our nation's written melody, who have 
soothed, and enlightened, and animated living myriads 
through successive generations. Scarcely can I hope to con- 
vey to you the same impression ; but, through all the fumes of 
your rich intellectual incense, I see them even noAV in my 
mind's eye, even there overhead, bending down upon us, and 
smiling approval. And why should they not be there, 

" If aught of things that here befall 
Touch a spirit among things divine," 

as Tennyson has expressively worded it? At least it seems to 
me, under the influence of surrounding accessories and asso- 
ciations, not unnatural that the men of the New World and of 
the Old should unite for briefest space upon the common 
ground of the world unseen. At least, too, the conceit has 
this merit — that each who listens may fill up its faint outline 
as best accords with his own individual conceptions. On one 
point alone we shall surely be all agreed. Picturing to your- 
selves this spirit-gathering — if picture it you can — you hail by 
instinct the one in the splendid group, installed for this 
night in the starriest place of honor. His name I need not 
repeat. For the rest, your own fancies may be brought into 



92 BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 



play ; mine I will not inflict npon you. Had I time, indeed, I 
should lack boldness to follow out mine own phantasy. I 
could not essay to trace the separate greeting of each master- 
mind above us — to paint William Shakspeare, for instance, 
recognizing in Robert Burns not one, but a thousand, of those 
natural touches which make the whole world kin ; or Walter 
Scott modestly reminding him of the fulfilment of his prophecy 
— " You'll be a man, yet, sir !" I content myself, therefore, 
with offering you this airy suggestion, in place of citing an 
abridgment of Johnson's Lives of the Poets, or plying you 
with a dissertation on the characteristics of British poetry. 

Thus much, Mr. Chairman, for the main matter of your toast ; 
but, if I have not already intruded too long, the sentiment with 
which it closes demands also a word of acknowledgment. You 
desire that the successors of a Shakspeare, a Burns, and a 
Moore, may continue to extend the dominions of Intellect, of 
Civilization, and of Freedom. Have no fear, gentlemen, on 
that score ! Institutions may pass away ; Science may be 
baffled or exhausted ; Learning may dwindle into Pedantry ; 
the face of the world may be changed — but Poetry is enduring, 
and dies not; nay, is gifted with perpetual youth. The Song 
of Solomon and the Iliad of Homer have come down to us 
in all their freshness, passing unharmed through long, long 
centuries of barbaric rule and intellectual darkness. And as 
it has been, so shall it be, in all events. Poetic pearls of price 
will retain forever the admiration of the world, if they perish 
not in the sifting process which each age undertakes for itself. 
'No, gentlemen, this is no new-fangled doctrine, no ism of the 
day. Poets have lived and made their mark — else why this 
sympathetic crowd ? Poets do live — as you yourself, Mr. 
Chairman, most honorably attest; and long may you live. Sir, 
to bear personal witness to the esteem in which your high 



THE CENTENARY FESTIVAL. 93 



calling is held ! Poets shall live — for what says one of them, 

Thomas Campbell, he who was born a countryman of Burns, 

but has been somehow drafted — I might almost say impressed 

— into the ranks of Englishmen ? Fervidly and truthfully 

does he break forth : 

" Yes, there are hearts, prophetic Hope may trust. 
That slumber yet in uncreated dust, 
Ordained to fire the adoring sons of earth 
With every charm of wisdom and of Avorth; 

" Ordained to light, with intellectual day. 
The mazy wheels of Nature as they play ; 
Or, warm with Fancy's energy, to glow 
And rival all but Shakspeare's name below !" 

Yerily I have faith, gentlemen, in that prediction; for other- 
wise this pleasant festival would wear to me the aspect of a 
funeral feast. As it is, so confident am I that the spiritual 
essence of Poetry will rise superior to the materialism which 
is crowding us in all the walks of life, that I could almost 
wish for you that the Spanish proverb might indeed be realized, 
and that you might each of you live a thousand years, so as 
to enjoy ten more of these Burns Club Centennial Anniver- 
saries. But if that may not be — as there are no Methuselahs 
in our days — let us doubt not that those who succeed us will 
in due time be similarly privileged. And so far as the nation 
is concerned to which the toast before us directly refers, I may 
remind you that it furnishes a signal proof that, if intellect and 
due regard to civilization are requisite in building up the 
modern Minstrel's fame, so a love for freedom has become an 
essential ingredient therein. You know, gentlemen, how a 
graceful remnant of the olden time still maintains a Poet 
Laureate at the British Court. On whose brow, I pray you, 
did the Lady Sovereign's hand suspend the wreath, that marks 
the poetic champion of the realm ? "Was it a sycoj^hant who 
was thus adorned ? an adulator ? a ringer of base metal ? a 



94 BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 



mere jingler of dulcet melodies? It was Alfred Tennyson! 
Breathes there a more genuine poet— one who has married im- 
mortal verse to sterner truths — one, in short, whose manfulness 
is more in unison with the manly spirit of Burns ? The more 
I think of this choice, gentlemen, and remember how it was 
made, and how popular acclaim approved it, the more assur- 
ance have I that the genius of British poetry gives no sign of 
death or decay ; the deeper is my respect for the Queen of the 
Isles ; the warmer my regard for my countrymen. 

Finally — for I trespass too long — I repeat that what has 
been, will be. We may look the future boldly in the face. 
If Cotton be King — as some anticipate — Poets-Laureate will 
still be crowned with the bays ; only, in independence at least, 
they must be and will be men of the Burns and the Tennyson 
stamp. 

Mr. Young's remarks were greeted with frequent applause. 

Mr. George Simpson then sang "The Minstrel Boy." 

Mr. J. D. NoRCOTT, 2d Vice-President, introduced the eighth 

regular toast with appropriate remarks : 

The Poets and Poetry of America, ens:rnven high upon the scroll of ffime 
— May their influence ever be exerted in favor of Truth, Virtue, and In- 
dependence. 

Music—'' The Old Oaken Bucket." 

Dr. John W. Francis was called on to respond, and on 
rising was loudly cheered. 

SPEECH OF DR. FRANCIS. 

Honored and Illustrious Chairman: It requires a Knicker- 
bocker of some confidence to obey the summons just issued. 
This is no ordinary meeting. I behold within this spacious 
hall an intellectual assemblage of the sons of Caledonia such 
as, I apprehend, was never before brought together in the New 



THE CENTENAEY FESTIVAL. 95 

World. I see before and around me, on every side, the repre- 
sentatives of an illustrious people, characterized by the acqui- 
sition of varied knowledge, and stamped with the attributes of 
genius. I see at the board, not only the possessors of wisdom, 
but the dispensers of its bounties. This magnificent spectacle, 
with all those beautiful illustrations on your walls, still further 
illuminated by so many well-known and familiar faces present 
among you in honor of this great occasion, bespeak a co-opera- 
tion in the measures of this night, of emphatic significance. I 
behold, moreover, at this festive board, the enlightened sons of 
almost every nation, and, more than all, I find a hearty com- 
munion in one great object of honor to intellect and liumanity. 
I have been taken somewhat by surprise at the duty assigned 
me on this memorable anniversary, to deliver my sentiments 
on the poetry and poets of America. Mr, President, what can 
be done with such a theme within the limits granted at this 
time ? Sir, had I offered up a prayer as long as the Heidel- 
bui-g catechism, I could not have asked for a more copious 
subject. Shall I take up the dead or the living ? Shall the 
subject be our earliest versifiers, the poets of the revolutionary 
period, or those of the present day, now flourishing ? Most 
conspicuous during our revolution were Freneau, Barlow, 
Trumbull, Humphreys ; and at the head we must place Fre- 
neau. Then follow Hopkius and Osborn, Alsop, Dwight. Of 
those of our later times, who will dare to enumerate them ? 
The genius of rhyme is a characteristic of our people, and I 
think that in due season poetry and music will give demon- 
strations of their mighty influence, to the satisfaction of the 
most sceptical. In this very presence I see before me two of 
our most illustrious bards, and the speaker who last addressed 
you did not exceed the hopes we cherish, when he said that 
each of them would have centenary celebrations granted, them. 



96 BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 



Bryant would be remembered as the descriptive poet of our 
American scenery, and of the benevolent sentiment ; Halleck 
would live in his flow of humor, his satire, and in liis illustra- 
tions of the times. There, sir, is a beautiful feature in the 
writings of our poets ; their purity, their freedom from corrup- 
tion and ribaldry. Several of our genuine poets have the ster- 
ling merit of having written marvelous hymns, a species of 
coDiposition justly pronounced of the highest order; and here 
we enumerate Freneau, Barlow, Br^^ant, Dwight and Longfel- 
low. But, most appropriate to our present design, how pleas- 
ant it is to reflect how happily their noble nature is unfolded 
in their felicitous pieces on the noble poet Burns. You all 
know what Bryant has written ; you have by heart the verses 
of llalleck — verses on the Scottish bard as undying as those 
v.'hich Burns himself has penned. I forget whether Drake gave 
wings to his refined and sensitive muse on the illustrious poet, 
but our Holmes and our Whittier have eni'iched our enumer- 
ation. All this shows a glorious impulse. 

Personally I knew many of our revolutionary and earlier 
poets, and their peculiarities in habits and manners attracted 
my notice in my boyish days. Freneau and Trumbull, Hum- 
phreys, Alsop, Dwight, arc fresh in recollection. I was in- 
structed, by observation, that physical bulk was no necessary 
element to poetical development ; and if a doctor may in this 
place give a medical opinion, I might be induced to say that 
the more delicate and refined the human form, the greater 
seems the inspiration manifested in the divine art ill such indi- 
viduals. Darwin had flesh enough for half a dozen Alexander 
Popes; Humphreys would have outweighed four or five Fre- 
neaus ; and my old colleague, Dr. Mitchill, might have swal- 
lowed up Drake, who so severely perforated his intercostals in 
his Croaker verses to Phlogobombos. Something more than 



THE CENTENARY FESTIVAL. 97 

flesh and blood are demanded to generate a poet. But 1 must 
leave that to the phrenologist. 

I shall not attempt a critical analysis of either tlie revolu- 
tionary poets or those of our own day. I have luxuriated in 
the society of many of them, and resting satisfied with a soli- 
tary opinion concerning one, I venture to say that our Philip 
Freneau is so identified by patriotism, by suifering, and by his 
prolific muse, with the momentous occurrences of the war of 
independence, that his name can never be blotted out from our 
American annals. His Hudibrastic exuberance will well com- 
pare with much of the caustic satire and vituperation of But- 
ler ; and the Scotch critic Jeifrey erred little when he said that 
Freneau might hereafter demand a Grey for a commentator. 
The most positive fact that w^e know concerning his adventur- 
ous life is, that, like Butler, he was miserably poor — the common 
lot of the poets of bygone da^^s. The many collections which 
have been made of the products of the Columbian muse, by 
different editors, from time to time, evince the fact that the 
article is marketable and well known. Hence I have the less 
need of analysis here, and shall rest satisfied that searchers after 
knowledge on this head may readily gratify their desires by 
studying the philosophical criticisms by Tuckerman, a brother 
poet and an essayist of the Addisonian school. 

You might infer my age to be a hundred years from what I 
have uttered, but you will bear in recollection that it was a 
peculiarity of my boyish and juvenile days always to seek the 
society of old persons — old soldiers, old tars, old philosophers, 
and men who had literary renown. By this I think I have 
given longevity to existence, and acquired much floating 
knowledge not in books ; and with this sort of practical infor- 
mation I have cherished anticipations of the future eminence 
of my country, in arts, in science, and in poetry. The nation, 
13 



98 



BURXS CEN'TEN'NIAL CELEBRATION". 



I think, lias done well in the inventive arts, and I would be 
most willing to witness the next centennial celebration of some 
present or future inspired bard. 

But I must leave this prolific theme, as I desire to say a few 
words on the great occasion that has summoned this imposing 
meeting, this great centennial. The sublime genius and child 
of song who has brought ns together this night, in whatever 
light he is viewed, is to be recognized as of an order of mortals 
rare and wonderful, and connnanding our admiration by the 
powers of his intellect and the humanity of his nature. Yonr 
search must be long ere yon iind his equal. Prolific as we 
are of biographies of the illustrious, he stands almost alone in 
his eminent attributes. He was, indeed, portion of what sur- 
rounded him, but he is yet sufficiently isolated to bear a dis- 
tinct impress, and to be stamped with an individuality that 
tolerates no amalgamation. Mr. President, you, in your appro- 
priate address at the opening of this meeting, gave utterance 
to sentiments convincing to all, that you fully comprehended 
the greatness of your subject, and with a poet's feelings you 
generously acknowledged the merits of the noble bard. There 
was a remarkable fitness in thus assigning to you this peculiar 
duty. You must well remember the lines which passed be- 
tween Hayley and the poet Cowper : 

" They host can tell a poet's worth 
Who oft tiiemselves have shown, 
The pangs of a poetic birth 
By labors of their own." 

With your kind permission, I will trespass a few moments 

longer on the patience of this large assembly. Forty-three 

years ago, I made a visit to Europe for professional advantages. 

On my arrival at Liverpool, there was some time at disposal 

ere the medical courses began. I thought it profitable to 

ramble through old Scotia in the meanwhile. The English 



THE CENTENARY FESTIVAL. 99 



lakes dispatched, and a cordial and most delectable interview 
held with Southey, at Greta Hall, near Keswick, where the 
great author vindicated his American feelings and services 
against the anonymous assaults he had received from some of 
our public wi-iters, I soon found myself in Scotland, and the 
names of Dumbarton and Doctor Hornbook, and the story of 
Plighland Marj'^, first sainted my ears. In Ayrshire, Bonnie 
Doon, the Twa Briggs, and Alio way Kirk, led to the mud cot- 
tage where the poet was born. With a very early relish for 
the Caledonian minstrel, I was now, by novel occurrences, im- 
pregnated with the greater zeal to occupy all leisure I could 
command to the study of the life, character, and services of 
Bui-ns, Kilmarnock, the place where his poems were first 
printed, &c., &c. It seemed to me, from all I heard, that every 
other name was lost in comparative obscurity compared with 
Burns'. He was the nation's idol, and every circumstance 
pertaining to him was the topic of popular discussion. I for- 
bear to be too minute, but I may affirm that the people held 
him in their heart of hearts, and laudatory strains proceeded 
from the peasant's lips and the enlightened scholar, with equal 
love and appreciation of his great qualities and mighty intel- 
lect. Were 1 to specify, as it occurred to me, the most deeply- 
impressed works of Burns, on the hearts of his countiymen, I 
would cite Highland Mary and Tam O'Shanter. At Dumfries I 
was so fortunate as to be introduced to John Syme, the long- 
tried, intimate and disinterested friend of Burns. This delect- 
able Scotchman, whose portrait, in Wilson's edition, is most 
happily given, yielded to me numerous facts and details con- 
cerning the national poet. Johnny Syme had in fact become 
the embodiment of almost every thing associated with Burns : 
he had made a study of the bard ; he comprehended his errors, 
his virtues, his writings ; pointed out what he conceived to be 



100 BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION, 



the source of their iinboiiiided popularity; his tenderness, his 
poetic temperament, and his deep inspiration. I visited the 
localities recorded in his poems, and could but wonder at the 
gratification a Scotchman felt when he designated the place 
where the poor mouse was turned up, where the daisy was 
crushed, &c., &c. The old blacksmith-shop, where Burns 
passed many hours, the conspicuous public edifice where he 
wrote the " Soldiers Return" on window-glass with his 
diamond pencil, are among a few of my reminiscences. . 

My visit to Nasmyth, the artist, led to the disclosure that 
but one painting was ever made of Burns from the life, and 
that the poet was I'elnctant to give the painter even time for 
that. My excellent friend Syme led me to Dr. Maxwell, the 
physician who attended Burns in his last illness, I thought, 
from the printed records, that obscurity rested on the immedi- 
ate cause of tlie premature demise of the illustrious patient. 
Dr. Maxwell was very frank in his statements. Burns had 
been led to the conviction that bathing in the Solway would 
restore his constitution ; and though at the time suifering from 
mercurial distress, he would listen to no advice to the contrary, 
but indulged in bathing for three or four days, when acute 
sufferings brought him home, where, after three days' painful 
existence, he died, Mr, Syme's courtesy made me acquainted 
with Bonnie Jean at her domicile. She confirmed the story of 
his illness and the manner of his death — a sad narrative, which 
she gave not without emotion. I passed some hours in 
conversation with dear Jean : I gave utterance to strong ex- 
pression in praise of the marvelous talents of her husband, and 
added that Burns was considered by our American people the 
greatest genius Scotland had given birth to. She replied, she 
had often heard the same praise bestowed on him by numerous 
visitors who called to see her: "Madam," I added, "such is 



THE CENTENARY FESTIVAL. 101 



the current opinion," "That I have learned," rejoined she, 
'' to be the case, since Ms death. I was ignorant of it before^ 
for Robert ivas very rarely at home.''\ Poor Jean said she had 
parted with every scrap of paper on wliich Burns had written ; 
so many had solicited even the smallest fragment of his com- 
position — a word, a sentence sufficed. She searched, however, 
for a while, and fortunately brought to my inspection some 
five or six lines of his manuscript, three words of which she 
gave me, "Go tell Gilbert." 

I shall conclude with stating that this night forty-three years 
ago I was honored with an invitation to Burns' anniversary, 
held in Edinburgh. Walter Scott presided, aided by Alexan- 
der Bos well, the late Lord Auchinleck. It was a great turn-out 
of Scotland's eminent men. Pi-ominent among the great festi- 
val were JeiFrey, the critic, Simond, the traveler, Wilson 
(Kit North), Sir George Mackenzie, Jamieson, the author of 
the Scottish Dictionary, Baird, the Principal of the University, 
several of the professors, George Thomson, the musical corre- 
spondent of the poet : — the Ettrick Shepherd had failed to ap- 
pear, and the venerable author of the Man of Feeling, Henry 
Mackenzie, whom I had seen a few days before at the High- 
land Society, was disabled by illness and infirmity, from mak- 
ing one of the social board. To the sentiment — "The living 
poets of Scotland" — Scott made a beautiful address in behalf 
of Campbell. 

Mr. Chairman, your occupancy of that chair reflects honor 
on the Burns Association, and allow me to say that the Club, 
in their selection, have added to your renown. The reputa- 
tion of the illustrious bard has swelled with each revolving year, 
and where shall we find another name in poetic history glori- 
fied by such demonstrations as mark this evening, in refined 
society, and in remotest parts of the world ? Burns' vast gifts 



102 BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 



first attracted attention in this country just about the period 
of the popularity of the Delia Cruscan school. That has dis- 
solved, while the Scottish minstrel is omnipresent everywhere. 
What are the ingredients which have nourislied to such vigor 
this extraordinary man? Sir, they were his enlarged humanity. 
He possessed an elephantine heart ; his sympathies with com- 
mon life, his love of his species, his wide benevolence, his 
patriotism, his lofty spirit of independence, his inflexible 
integrity, his unflinching honesty, his deep, pervading re- 
liojious sentiment toward God and man. He wrote for un- 
lettered men and for the peasantry, and yet the wiser we 
grow the deeper is our reverence for him ; childhood 
and youth are delighted with him — the philosopher is in- 
structed by him, so deep are his researches into nature. I 
have heard little said to-night touching his prose compositions. 
His dedication to the Caledonian Hunt is almost an unequaled 
specimen of pure English style ; his correspondence Avith 
Thomson will not sufler in comparison with the best of 
writers. There is a strain of exalted devotion in him toward 
his Creator that finds scared}' a parallel among the writings of 
acknowledged theologians, and his honest sentiments 3'ield to 
the afitiicted and tlie forlorn a consolation not unlike that de- 
rived from the page of Holy Writ. Tliere is a frankness in 
his expressions of abhorrence against religious hypocrisy that 
touches the heart of the experienced sojourner on earth. You 
will pardon rny citing a verse : 

" God knows I'm not the thing I should be, 
Nor am I even the thing I could be, 
But, twenty times, I rather would be 

An Atheist clean, 
Than under Gospel colors hid be, 

Just for a screen." 

As associated with the renown of Burns, I would crave a 



THE CENTENARY FESTIVAL. 103 

moment's indiilo^ence while I speak of that remarkable occur- 
rence which took place in this our metropolis ; the arrival, 
many years ago, of those striking examples of art, the sculp- 
tor's illustrations of the Poet, the group of Souter Johnny, Tam 
O'Shanter, and the Landlady. That intuitive genius Thom gave 
satisfactory evidence of his rich capability to unfold in palp- 
able form the imaginings of Burns, and let me add that prob- 
ably no work in sculpture ever met with a heartier acceptance 
by our people than these specimens of unlettered talent and 
intellect. Burns' vast popularity unquestionably swelled the 
crowds to see and to admire those extraordinary productions, 
and they found that the chisel of Thom had imparted life and 
animation to the poet's finest conception, and furnished master- 
pieces of graphic delineation worthy of a nation's pride. I 
have often conversed M'itli Thom : some of the best efforts of 
art may be found in the workmanship of the recently erected 
Trinity Church, at the head of Wall street. I fear he was too 
much neglected even by his countrymen. He died some four or 
five years ago in straitened circumstances. I had the honor 
to be one of the limited number wdio attended his funeral. But 
this late hour of the night, or rather advanced state of the morn- 
ing, prohibits further observations, and I shall say no more. 

Dr. Francis resumed his seat amid great and prolonged ap- 
plause. 

The hour of one o'clock having arrived, Mr. Bryant rose to 
retire. The President of the Club announced his intention, and 
proposed his health with Highland honors. This was one of the 
most animated scenes of the evening, each person standing upon 
his seat, with one foot upon the table, and cheering with the 
utmost enthusiasm. Mr. Bi-yant thanked the company for the 
warmth of feeling exhibited toward him, and withdrew. The 
chair was then occupied by the President of the Club. 



104 BURXS CEXTEXNIAL CELEBRATION. 



Mr, William Park then sang, with good taste, " Woodman, 
spare that tree." 

The ninth toast was next proposed by Mr. Archibald : 

TJie Heroes of Scotland. — Inspired by patriotism and love of libertv, 
their noble deeds have shed unfading lustre on the land of their birth ; and 
while the patriot's claymore rusts, and his shield hangs useless on the 
wall, may the valor that wielded them be held in undying remembrance 
by a grateful posterity. 

The toast was received with a storm of apphanse. 

3IusiG.—'' Garb of Old GauL" 

Mr. James Nicholson (a member of the Club), responded. 

MR. Nicholson's speech. 

Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen : It must have been a 
source of pride and gratiHcation to every Scotchman in this 
assembly to witness the enthusiasm with which this toast has 
been received. 

If this company were all Scots, and seated around one of the 
many festive boards spread this evening in honor of Robert 
Burns, in the land of his and their birth, in the land which he 
so dearly loved and sung, surrounded by monuments of Scot- 
tish patriotism and valor, by the places that gave our heroes 
birth — by the heathery hills where they rambled in childhood, 
and the scenes where in manhood they fought and conquered, 
or fell — such an enthusiasm might have excited no conmient ; 
but here in the empire city of the New World, and in an as- 
sembly where so many diiferent nations are represented, it 
proves that Scotland's heroes are more than national — that 
their valor and patriotism have won for them the admiration 
and gratitude of every lover of freedom thronghout the world. 
When speaking of the "heroes of Scotland," the mind natu- 
rally reverts to the names of Wallace and Bruce ; not, however. 



THE CENTENARY FESTIVAL. 105 

to the exclusion of lier many other sods, who have maintained 
the honor of their country, and won the proud title of " hero" 
on many a hard-fought battlefield, from the earliest period of 
her history down to the present day — from Galgacus to Sir 
Colin Campbell — but because tliey^ by indomitable courage 
and steady perseverance, rescued their country from oppres- 
sion, and secured her independence, at a period the darkest in 
her history — when her very thistle scarcely dared to raise its 
prickly stem to the light of day, and when the bloom of her 
heather blushed a deeper crimson, as if dyed by the blood of 
her bravest and best, that had fallen in defending it from the 
hoof of the invader ; it is because in securing their country's 
independence they laid the foundation of all the greatness of 
which our Avorthy guest so eloquently spoke in his response to 
the toast of " Scotland" — it is because they left to posterity a 
noble example of what can be done by true men in a just 
cause, and telling them more forcibly than words can express, 
" Who would be free, himself must strike the blow," 

If we turn to the page of history, we find there have been 
many heroes, both in ancient and modern times, who have led 
great armies, and won great victories, as great in a military 
point of view, whose names are almost forgotten, or if remem- 
bered, it is only with a feeling of regret, to think hov\' many 
braVe men they sacrificed in their efforts to leave their " foot- 
prints on the sands of time ;" bnt our heroes fought ];ot for 
selfish fame, they fought not for conquest, they fought not to 
enslave other countries, but to save their own ; they fought for 
their birthright, for liberty, for country, for home, for every 
thing that makes life worth possessing. Their cause was the 
cause of human freedom : " Their every battlefield was holy 
ground." 

It is this that makes such names as Wallace and Washing- 
14 



106 BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 

ton " household words ;" it is this that makes them more than 
national— their fame belongs to no country, to no definite 
period, but to all time. Their claymores now rest, and their 
shields hang useless on the wall ; but their memories are still 
dear to us ; to them, and such as them, we are indebted for the 
liberty and independence we now enjoy, and while thus ex- 
pressing our gratitude and acknowledging their influence in the 
past, we may still hope that — 

" Their names will be, 
A watchword till the future shall be free." 

Mr. William Cleland then gave the air, " Scots, wha hae," 
upon the Scottish pipes, amid great enthusiasm, after which 
Mr. Miranda sang the song with remarkable eftect, and was 
rapturously encored. 

The tenth toast was then announced by the Chairman : 

The Memory of Washington. 

This toast was received by the company standing, in silence, 
the band playing a dirge. / 

Mr. Parke Godwin here made some eloquent remarks, but 
from the lateness of the hour they were not reported. 

The eleventh toast was introduced by Mr. Archibald, and 
properly honored : 

The Prfss— May it ever be guided by men pure and upright — the herald 
of Freedom — the right hand of Civilization — spreading intelligence and 
virtue among the people, and dispelling the darkness of Ignorance and 
Superstition. 

[This toast, like the sixth, was announced out of its regular 
order, to accommodate Mr. Greeley, who was to respond.] 

Music. — " There's a good time coming." 



THE CENTENARY FESTIVAL. 107 



HON. HORACE GREELEY 

responded briefly, but pertinently. He said that it seemed bnt 
just that the admirers of Burns sliould honor the Press, for he 
would not have been known as he is had it not been for the 
Press. They say there were great kings before Agamemnon, 
and great poets before Homer — but what does the world know 
of them ? They perished in the same age in which they were 
born. There may have been other poets in Scotland as inspired 
as Burns, w^hose songs were never heard beyond the circle of 
their friends. 

" Full many a flower is born to blush unseen." 

But Burns was more fortunate. Burns' boyhood was passed 
amid the stir of great events. Had the electric telegraph then 
existed, he might almost have listened to the roar of cannon 
at Lexington and at Bunker Hill. In its hour the press has 
owed much to Burns, It has learned to take the side of the 
friendless, against tradition and against the privileges of the 
higher classes. Tliis character it owes to the spirit of Robert 
Burns. It is well that the Press is deemed worthy of the com- 
mendation of his friends. Such recognition will cheer the 
journalist and inspire the poet. Mr. Greeley closed with the 
following sentiment: 

The Peasant Poet — Great in what he has done for the unprivileged 
million ; greater in what he has taught them to do for themselves. 

Mr. Greeley's remarks were warmly received. When he 
had concluded — 

Mr. Geo. Marshall sang " The Birth of Printing," an ode 
written many years since, by Mr. Greeley, for another occa- 
sion. 



108 BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 

The twelfth and last regular toast was given fi'om the Chair, 
and was received, as usual, with vehement applause. 

The Lasses — Clustering tendrils, twining thonisolves around man's 
dearest affections : the pride and ornament of bis youth and manhood — 
the constant and never-failing stay of declining years. 

Music. — " Green grow the rashes, O !'' 

Mr. Richard Bell, of the St. Patrick's Society, who was 
to have responded, having retired — 

Mr. Edward Fisher (a member of the Club) spoke to the 
toast ; and for a considerable time entertained the company 
with one of the most witty speeches of the evening. 

Mr. Geo. Smpson then sang " My wife's a winsome wee 
thing,'' with such effect as called for a repetition, when he 
substituted with equal felicity and good taste " My bonnie 
Jean." 

The Chairman then called upon Mr. Joseph Laing for an 
original song, written for this occasion, by a member of the 
Club, as the closing feature of the programme. It was given, 
as follows, with great applause : 

THE KING O' MEN. 

BY T. C. LATTO. 

Should humble state our mirth provoke, 

What folly to misca' that ; 
The sapMng grows a stately oak, 

Wi' spreading shade an' a' that. 
A hunder years sinsyne in Kyle 

The gossips laugh'd an' a' that, 
As wi' a cry an' half a smile. 

Wee Rab cam hame an' a' that. 

For a' that an' a' that, 

His toils, his cares an' a' that, 

We've seen a plowman crowned at last 

The king o' men for a' that. 



A sturdy imp an' strong he grew, 

AVas fond o' fun an' a' that, 
But Independence never knew 

A braver son for a' that. 
A frichten'd mouse his heart wad move, 

A gowan crushed, an' a' that, 
But woman's e'e and woman's love 

They were his muse for a' that. 

He seized the lyre when in his teens. 

He struck it sweet an' a' that ; 
He thrill'd the hearts o' Scottish Jeans, 

An' wan their love an' a' that. 
And now a hunder years hae pass'd, 

0' checker'd hue an' a' that, 
What he was then an' what he's noo 

I leave ye a' to draw that. 

He sweeps, a comet, thro' the wain. 

Its heights an' howes an' a' that ; 
An' gathering glory for his train. 

As on he rowes an' a' that. 
The Prince that ruled where he was reared 

His name's forgot an' a' that, 
But wha forgets the Peasant bard, 

What Scotsman ever saw that ? 

Let Genius take its mighty swing. 

We've seen the day an' a' that ; 
A cotter rise aboon a king. 

The king o' men for a' that. 
Then fill your bumpers up, my lads. 

We'll drain them out an' a' that ; 
Wi' three times three for Scotia's Bard, 

Wha's king o' men for a' that. 

For a' that an' a' that. 
His toils, his cares an' a' that : 
We crown this night a plowman lad. 
The king o' men for a' that. 

The President then read the following communication from 
Yair Clirehugh, Sr., Esq., a former President of the Club, 
but now of Montrose, Scotland. Mr. Clirehugh was well 
known to many of those present, and his letter and sentiment 
received cordial greeting. The following is a copy : 



110 BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 



To THE President of the Burns Club of New York City : 

My Dear Sir: 

I have much pleasure in transmitting a sentiment for this 
great and auspicious occasion, under the impression that it will receive 
no less a welcome than has been so often accorded to myself from the 
members of the Club. 

Although my voice is no longer heard in your halls, and may never 
again — " tho' seas between us braid hae roared," — yet my words may 
still find a response at your social gatherings, while the memories if tho 
past, as long as life shall last, will ever bloom fresh and green in my 
heart. I remain, dear Sir, 

Yours very truly, 

Vair Clirehugh. 
Montrose, Scotland, 6th Jan., 1859. 



SENTIMENT. 



May prosperity always follow the progress of the New York Burns 
Club : may its members, linked in one common brotherhood, ever enjoy 
the moral pleasures of to-day, and be ever ready to meet sorrow and 
mischance to-morrow. 

The President also announced the receipt of a letter from 
another ex-President of the Club, Mr. James Linen, now a 
resident of San Francisco, Cal., which M'as also cordially 
honored bj tlie company. 



DELEGATIONS, DISPATCHES, AND COMMUNICATIONS. 

In the course of the evening, a delegation from the Burns 
Association celebrating the day at Mozart Hall, New York, 
was introduced. The gentlemen composing it (Messrs. T. C. 
Gkay, a. Tuknbull, and T. F. Bowie) conveyed a sentiment 
from the Burns Association, which was received with all the 
honors. 

The sixth regular toast — " Kindred Associations throughout 



THE CENTENARY FESTIVAL. Ill 

the worlcl^'' as has been previously intimated in this report, 
was telegraphed during the day and evening to the following 
places, to be given simultaneously at ten o'clock, p. m.. New 
York time : 

Boston, Mass. St. Louis, Mo. 

Philadelphia, Penn. !N^atchp:z, Miss. 

Newark, N. J. St. John's, N. B. 

Albany, N. Y. Halifax, N. S. 

Troy, " Quebec, C. E. 

Auburn, " Three Rivers, C. E. 

Baltimore, Md. Montreal, " 

Cincinnati, O. Cornwall, C. W. 

Charleston, S. C. Kingston, " 

Detroit, Mich. Toronto, " 

MiLWAUKiE, Wis. Hamilton, " 

Telegraphic dispatches were announced from the Chair, dur- 
ing the evening, from all parts of the United States and the 
Canadas, and received with great enthusiasm. It was designed 
to furnish a complete list of the places from which dispatches 
and communications were received, and the sentiments con- 
veyed : but as many of the documents have been mislaid, we 
are compelled to abandon the intention. 

After the regular business of the evening was concluded, a 
number of songs, sentiments and speeches were given by vari- 
ous members of the company, but the lateness of the hour pre- 
cluded the general participation, which is usually one of the 
most attractive features of a Burns I estival. At about three 
o'clock, a. m., the Centennial Festival was closed with the time- 
honored song, " Auld Lang Syne." 

Besides the celebration by the Burns Club, various other 



112 BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 

meetings, public and private, were held in the city of New- 
York in honor of the occasion. 

Tlie Burns Association held a brilliant and successful meet- 
ing at Mozart Hall, Broadway. David B. Scott, Esq., presided, 
and many effective speeches were made. That of Prof. Naikne 
has been universally spoken of as one of the most eloquent 
tributes of the day. 

The " AuLD Lang Syne" Association also celebrated the an- 
niversary in an appropriate manner. David B. Kerb, Esq., 
presided. 

A spirited gathering of gentlemen, numbering over one hun- 
dred, w^as convened at the corner of William and Pine streets. 
Robert Anderson, Esq., presided. 

These and other more private assemblies fitly represented the 
admirers of Burns in the great empire city of America, on the 
memorable 25th of January, 1859. 



[The Editor tenders his acknowledgments to the efficient 
Corresponding Secretary, and other members of the Club, for 
material and information furnished in the compilation of this 
report.] 



irllitje^ 0f tit lj0it^ 



THE PRIZE ODE, 

DELIVERED AT THE CRYSTAL PALACE, LONDON, JANUARY 25, 1859. 

[It was announced at the Centenary Festival at the Sydenham Crystal Palace, 
London, that the prize of Fifty Pounds offered by the Company for the best Poem 
for the occasion had been unanimously adjudged, from among six hundred and 
twenty competitors, to Miss Agnes Craig. Miss Craig is a young Scotchwoman, a 
native of Edinburgh. Early left an orphan, she was reared and educated under the 
care of a grandmother not in affluent circumstances. With praiseworthy industry, 
and self-cultivation of her intellectual powers, she early resolved to work out her 
own pecuniary independence. Bj^ occasional poetical contributions to the Edinburgh 
Scotsman, she gained the notice and kindness of Mr. John Ritchie, the oldest and 
principal proprietor of that journal ; and for some years she was employed by this 
early patron and friend on its literary department. In 1856 Messrs. Blackwood 
published in a small volume a collection of Miss Craig's fugitive metrical composi- 
tions, under the title of "Poems by Isa." The author has also been a contributor, 
under the signature of " C," to the poetry of the National Magazine. In August, 
1857, on Miss Craig's first visit to a London friend, Mr. Hastings, the honorary secre- 
tary of the National Association of Social Science, engaged her services in the 
organization of the society, and to this association Miss Craig is still attached as a 
literary assistant. The published transactions of the association owe much to her 
talent and good judgment.] 

We hail this morn, 
A century's noblest birth ; 

A Poet peasant-born, 
Who more of Fame's immortal dower 
Unto his country brings. 
Than all her Kings ! 

As lamps high set 
Upon some earthly eminence, — 
And to tjie gazer brighter thence 



114 BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 



Than the sphere-lights they flout, — 
Dwindle in distance and die out, 
While no star waneth yet ; 

So through the past's far-reaching night, 

Only the star-souls keep their light. 

A gentle boy — • 
With moods of sadness and of mirth, 

Quick tears and sudden joy — 
Grew up beside the peasant's hearth. 
His father's toil he shares ; 
But half his mother's cares 
From his dark searching eyes. 
Too swift to sympathize. 
Hid in her heart she bears. 

At early morn, 
His father calls him to the field ; 
Through the stiif soil that clogs his feet, 

Chill rain, and harvest heat, 
He plods all day ; returns at eve outworn. 
To the rude fare a peasant's lot doth yield : 

To what else was he born ? 

The God-made King 
Of every living thing, 
(For his great heart in love could hold them all) ; 
The dumb eyes meeting his by hearth and stall, — 
Gifted to understand ! — 
Knew it and. sought his hand ; 
And the most timorous creature had not fled, 
Could she his heart have read, 
Which fain all feeble thino-s had blessed and sheltered. 



TRIBUTES OF THE POETS. 115 



To Nature's feast — 

Who knew her noblest guest, 

And entertain'd him best, 
Kingly he came. Her chambers of the east 
She draped with crimson and with gold, 
And pour'd her pure joy-wines 

For him the poet-souled, 

For him her anthem rolled. 
From the storm-wind among the winter pines, 

Down ta the slenderest note 
Of a love-warble from the linnet's tliroat. 

But wdien begins 
The array for battle, and the trumpet blows, 
A King must leave the feast, and lead the fight. 

And with its mortal foes — 
Grim gathering hosts of sorrows and of sins — 

Each human soul must close. 

And Fame her trumpet blew 
Before him ; wrapped him in her purple state ; 
And made him mark for all the shafts of fate, 

That henceforth round him flew. 

Though he may yield 
Hard-press'd, and wounded fall, 
Forsaken on the field ; 
His regal vestments soil'd ; 
His crown of half its jewels spoil'd ; 
He is a King for all. 
Had he but stood aloof! 
Had he array'd himself in armor proof 
Against temptation's darts ! 
So yearn the good ; — so those the world calls wise, 
With vain presumptuous hearts, 
Triumjjhant moralize. 



Of martyr-woe 
A sacred shadow on his memory rests ; 

Tears have not ceased to flow ; 
Indignant grief yet stirs imj)etuous breasts, 
To think — above that noble soul brought low, 
That wise and soaring spirit fooled, enslaved — 
Thus, thus he had been saved ! 

It might not be ! 
That heart of harmony 
Had been too rudely rent ; 
Its silver chords, which any hand could wound, 
By no hand could be tuned. 
Save by the Maker of the instrument. 
Its every string who knew. 
And from profaning touch His heavenly gift withdrew. 

Regretful love 

His country fain would prove, 
By grateful honors lavish'd on his grave; 

Would fain redeem her blame 
That He so little at her hands can claim, 

Who, unrewarded, gave 
To her his life-bought gift of song and fame. 

The land he trod 
Hath now become a place of pilgrimage ; 
Where dearer are the daisies of the sod 
That could his song engage, 
The hoary hawthorn, wreath'd 
Above the bank on which his limbs he flung 
While some sweet plaint he breathed ; 
The streams he wander'd near ; 
The maidens whom he loved ; the songs lie sung ; — 
All, all are dear ! 



TRIBUTES OF THE POETS. 117 

The arch blue eyes — 
Arch but for love's disguise — 
Of Scotland's daughters, soften at his strain ; 
Her hardy sons, sent forth across the main 
To drive the plowshare through earth's virgin soils, 

Lighten with it their toils ; 
And sister-lands have learned to love the tongue 
In which such songs are sung. 

For doth not Song 
To the whole world belong ! 
Is it not given wherever tears can fall, — 
Wherever hearts can melt, or blushes glow, 
Or mirth and sadness mingle as they flow, 
A heritao;e to all ! 



118 



BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 



BURNS. 

TO A ROSE, BROUGHT FROM NEAR ALLOWAY KIRK, IN AYRSHIRE, IN THE 

AUTUMN OF 1822. 

[By the kind permission of Messrs. D. Appleton & Co., publishers, we 
are enabled to give this extract from the poems of Fitz Greene Halleck. 
It was written many years since, and has always been regarded as one of 
the noblest tributes paid to the memory of Burns by an American. The 
presence of its distinguished author at the festival at the Astor House, 
renders its insertion here peculiarly appropriate.] 

Wild Rose of Alloway ! my thanks : 
Thou 'mindst me of that autumn noon 

When first we met upon " the banks 
And braes o' bonny Doon." 

Like thine, beneath the thorn-tree's bough, 

My sunny hour was glad and brief. 
We've crossed the winter sea, and thou 

Art withered — flower and leaf. 

And will not thy death-doom be mine — 
The doom of all things wrought of clay — 

And withered my life's leaf like thine. 
Wild rose of Alloway ? 



Not so his memory, for whose sake 
My bosom bore thee far and long, 

His — who a humbler flower could make 
Immortal as his song. 



TRIBUTES OF THE POETS. 119 



The memory of Burns — a name 

That calls, when brimmed her festal cup, 
A nation's glory and her shame, 

In silent sadness up. 

A nation's glory — be the rest 

Forgot — she's canonized his mind ; 

And it is joy to speak the best 
We may of human kind. 

I've stood beside the cottage bed 

Where the Bard-peasant first drew breath ; 
A straw-thatched roof above his head, 

A straw-wrought couch beneath. 

And I have stood beside the pile. 

His monument — that tells to Heaven 

The homage of earth's proudest isle 
To that Bard-peasant given ! 

Bid thy thoughts hover o'er that spot, 
Boy-Minstrel, in thy dreaming hour ; 

And know, however low his lot, 
A Poet's pride and power. 

The pride that lifted Burns from earth, 
The power that gave a child of song 

Ascendency o'er rank and birth. 
The rich, the brave, the strong: 

And if despondency weigh down 
Thy spirit's fluttering pinions then, 

Despair — thy name is written on 
The roll of common men. 



120 



BUENS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 



There have been loftier themes than his. 
And longer scrolls, and louder lyres, 

And lays lit up with Poesy's 
Purer and holier fires : 



Yet read the names that know not death ; 

Few nobler ones than Burns are there ; 
And few have won a greener wreath 

Than that which binds his hair. 

His is that language of the heart. 

In which the answering heart would speak. 
Thought, word, that bids the warm tear start. 

Or the smile light the cheek ; 

And his that music, to whose tone 

The common pulse of man keeps time, 

In cot or castle's mirth or moan, 
In cold or sunny clime. 

And who hath heard his song, nor knelt 
Before its spell with willing knee. 

And listened, and believed, and felt 
The Poet's mastery. 

O'er the mind's sea, in calm and storm. 
O'er the heart's sunshine and its showers. 

O'er Passion's moments bright and warm. 
O'er Keason's dark, cold hours ; 



On fields where brave men " die or do," 
In halls where rings the banquet's mirth. 

Where mourners weep, where lovers woo, 
From throne to cottage hearth ? 



TRIBUTES OF THE POETS. 121 



What sweet tears dim the eye unshed, 
What wild vows falter on the tongue, 

When " Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled," 
Or " Auld Lang Syne" is sung ! 

Pure hopes, that lift the soul above, 
Come with his Cotter's hymn of praise. 

And dreams of youth, and truth, and love. 
With " Logan's" banks and braes. 

And when he breathes his master-lay 
Of Alloway's witch-haunted wall, 

x\ll passions in our frames of clay 
Come thronging at his call. 

Imagination's world of air. 

And our own world, its gloom and glee. 
Wit, pathos, poetry, are there. 

And death's sublimity. 

And Burns — though brief the race he ran, 
Though rough and dark the path he trod. 

Lived — died — in form and soul a Man, 
The image of his God. 

Through care and pain, and want, and woe. 
With wounds that only death could heal, 

Tortures — the poor alone can know. 
The proud alone can feel, 

He kept his honesty and truth, 
His independent tongue and pen. 

And moved, in manhood as in youth. 
Pride of his fellow men. 



It> 



122 



BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 



Strong sense, deep feeling, passions strong, 
A hate of tyrant and of knave, 

A love of riglit, a scorn of wrong, 
Of coward and of slave ; 

A kind, true heart, a spirit high, 

That could not fear and would not bow, 

Were Avritten in his manly eye 
And on his manly brow. 

Praise to the bard ! his words are driven. 
Like flower-seeds by the far winds sown, 

Where'er, beneath the sky of heaven, 
The birds of fame have flown. 

Praise to the man ! a nation stood 
Beside his coffin with wet eyes, 

Her brave, her beautiful, her good. 
As when a loved one dies. 

And still, as on his funeral day, 

Men stand his cold earth-couch around, 

With the mute homage that we pay 
To consecrated ground. 



And consecrated ground it is. 

The last, the hallowed home of one 

Who lives upon all memories, 
Though with tlie buried gone. 

Such graves as his are pilgrim shrines, 
Slu'ines to no code or creed confined- 

The Delphian vales, the PaleStines, 
The Meccas of the mind. 



TRIBUTES OF THE POETS. 123 

Sages, with wisdom's garland wreathed, 

Crowned kings, and mitred priests of power, 

And warriors with their bright swords sheathed, 
The mightiest of the hour ; 

And lowlier names, whose humble home 

Is lit by Fortune's dimmer star. 
Are there — o'er wave and mountain come. 

From countries near and far ; 

Pilgrims whose wandering feet have pressed 

The Switzer's snow, the Arab's sand. 
Or trod the piled leaves of the West, 

My own green forest-land. 

All ask the cottage of his birth, 

Gaze on the scenes he loved and sung, 

And gather feelings not of earth 
His fields and streams among. 

They linger by the Doon's low trees, 

And pastoral Nith, and wooded Ayr, 
And round thy sepulchres, Dumfries ! 

The poet's tomb is there. 

But what to them the sculptor's art. 

His funeral columns, wreaths and urns? 

Wear they not graven on the heart 
The name of Eobert Burns ? 



124 BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 



HIS BIRTHDAY. 

BY OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

[written foe the centennial celebration at boston.] 

His birthday — nay, we need not speak 
The name each heart is beating. — 

Each glistening eye and flushing cheek 
In light and flame repeating ! 

We come in one tumultuous tide, — 

One surge of wild emotion, — 
As crowding through the Firth of Clyde 

Rolls in the Western Ocean. 

As when yon cloudless, quartered moon 

Hangs o'er each storied river, 
The swelling breasts of Ayr and Doon 

With sea-green wavelets quiver. 

The century shrivels like a scroll, — 

The past becomes the present, — 
And face to face, and soul to soul, 

We greet the monarch -peasant ! 

While Shenstone strained in feeble flights 

With Corydon and Phillis, — 
While Wolfe was climbing Abraham's Heights 

To snatch the Bourbon lilies, 



TRIBUTES OF THE POETS. t25 



WJio heard the wailing infant's cry, — 
The babe beneath the shieling, 

Whose song to-night in every sky, 
Will shake earth's starry ceiling, — 



Whose passion-breathing voice ascends 

And floats like incense o'er ns. 
Whose ringing lay of friendship blends 

With Labor's anvil chorus ? 

We love him, not for sweetest song ; 

Though never tone so tender, — 
We love liim, even in his wrong, — 

His wasteful self-surrender. 

We praise him not for gifts divine, — ■ 

His muse was born of woman, — 
His manhood breathes in every line, 

Was ever heart more human ? 

We love him, praise him just tor this ; 

In every form and feature. 
Through wealth and want, through wo and bliss. 

He saw his fellow-creature ! 

!N^o soul could sink beneath his love — 

[N^ot even angel blasted ; — 
'No mortal power could soar above 

The pride that all outlasted ! 

Ay ! Heaven had set one living man 

Beyond the pedant's tether — 
His virtues, frailties, He may scan, 

Who weighs them ail together ! 



126 BUENS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 

I fling my pebble on the cairn 
Of him, though dead, undying, 

Sweet Nature's nursling, bonniest bairn. 
Beneath her daisies lying. 

The waning suns, the wasting globe 
Shall spare the minstrel's story — 

The centuries wave his purple robe, 
The mountain-mist of glory ! 



TRIBUTES OF THE POETS. 127 



A TRIBUTE, 

BY JOHN G. WHIITIEK. 

[delivered at the centennial celebration at boston.] 

How sweetly come the holy psalms 

From saints and martyrs down, 
The waving of triumphal palms 

Above the thorny crown ! 
The choral praise, the chanted prayers 

From harps by angels strung, 
The hunted Cameron's mountain airs, 

The hymns that Luther sung ! 

Yet, jarring not the heavenly notes, 

The sounds of earth are heard. 
As through the open minster floats 

The song of breeze and bird. 
Not less the wonder of the sky 

That daisies bloom below ; 
The brook sings on, though loud and high 

The cloudy organs blow ! 

And, if the tender ear be jarred 

That haply hears by turns 
The saintly harp of Olney's bard, 

The pastoral pipe of Burns, 
ISTo discord mars his perfect plan 

"Who gave them both a tongue. 
For, he who sings the love of man 

The love of God hath snno- ! 



128 



BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 



To-day be every fault forgiven 

Of him in whom we joy ; 
We take, with thanks, the gold of heaven 

And leave the earth's alloy. 
Be ours his music as of spring, 

His sweetness as of flowers, 
Tlie songs the bard himself might sing 



In holier ears than ours. 



Sweet airs of love and home, the hum 

Of household melodies. 
Come singing, as the robins come 

To sing in door-yard trees. 
And, heart to heart, two nations lean 

No rival wreaths to twine. 
But blending, in eternal green, 

The holly and the pine ! 



TRIBUTES OF THE POETS. 129 



THE BALTIMORE PRIZE ROEM. 

BY THOMAS FRASER. 

[The Burns Club of Baltimore, some time previous to the Centenary Cele- 
bration, offered a Prize for the best Poem for the occasion. The Com- 
mittee of award, of whom Honorable J. P. Kennedy was Chairman, 
adjudged the Prize to Mr. Thomas Fraser, of Newark, N. J. In the letter 
intimating their decision, they paid a high compliment to the author. Mr. 
Fraser is a native of Edinburgh. The Scottish American Journal, in a notice 
of the Poem, says : "It is worthy of the great occasion, and more than 
worthy of that Scottish muse which, when exiled to these Western shores, 
becomes intensified both in its patriotic and poetic ardor."] 

Kyle claims his birth ; — wide earth, his name, 
Where climes scarce kenn'cl yet, peal liis fame, 
An' gaun time gayly chimes the same 

Where'er he turns, 
Kow, every true warm lieart's the hanie 

O' Minstrel Burns ! 

Where Boreas brawls o'er blind'rin' snaw ; 
Where simmer jinks through scented shaw ; 
Where westlin' zephyrs saftly blaw, 

There Robin reigns ; 
An' even the thowless Esquimaux 

Ilae heard his strains ! 

Dear bonny Doon, clear gurglin' Ayr, 
Pure Afton an' the Lugar fair. 
Can claim his sangs their ain nae mair, 
Sin' lang years syne, 
Braw Hudson an' thrang Delaware 
Kenn'd every line ! 
17 



130 



BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 



Frae zone to zone ! — where'er we trace 
Tlie clearin' o' the pale-faced race ; — 
Where still the red man trains the chase 

Through prairie brake, 
E'en there his sang wi' sweet wild grace 

Rings round the lake ! 

The lone backwoodsman, as he seems 
To ponder o'er his forest schemes, 
Hums auld lang syne among his dreams 

O' far-aff hame, 
An' thinks, God bless him ! that the strains 

Croon Robin's name I 

Mothers wdia skirled his sangs when bairns 
In Carrick, Lothian, Merse or Mearns, 
Are listenin' now by Indian cairns 

Wi' hearts half sobbin', 
While some wee dawty blythely learns 

A verse frae Robin ! 



Sound though he sleeps in death's cauld bower, 
O ! what o' hearts this chosen hour. 
Far as fleet fancy's wing can scower. 

In raptured thrangs, 
Are thirling wi' the warlock power 

O' Robin's sangs. 

Frae AUoway's auld haunted aisle 
To far Australia's gowd-strewn soil ; 
And e'en where India's ruthless guile 

Mak's mercy quake, 
Soul-minglin' there, worth, w^ealth and toil 

Meet for his sake. 



TRIBUTES OF THE POETS. 131 

True hearts at hame — true to the core, 
To auld Scots bards an' auld warld lore, 
Are blendin — as in scenes o' yore, 

Wi' Burns the van — 
Love for braw Clydesdale's wild woods hoar. 

An' love for man. 

Staid Arthur's Seat's grim gray man's head 
Bows to Auld Reekie's requiem reed ; 
While Soutra lifts the wailin' screed. 

An' Tweed returns 
His plaintive praises o'er the dead, 

The darlin' Burns. 

Poor dowie Mauchline dights her e'e ; 
Nith maunders to the sabbin sea ; 
An' high on Bannock's far-famed lea 

The stalwart thistle 
Droops as the winds in mournfu' key 

Around him rustle. 

Dark glooms Dumfries, as slowly past 
Saunt Michael's growls tlie gruesome blast. 
Where Scotia, pale an' sair down-cast. 

Clasps the sad grun 
That haps her loved, and to the last 

Immortal Son ! 

While backward frae the grave-yard drear. 
Thought, tremblin' through a hundred yeai-. 
Sees Doon's clay cot, where weel hained cheer, 

Shows poorti til's joy 
When Nature's sel' brought hame her dear. 

Choice, noble boy. 



132 BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 

But soon blythe hope fu' kindly keeks 
Within her wae-snnk heart, an' seeks 
To tint her trickling snaw-white cheeks 

Wi' words that burn, — 
Why ! when a world her bard's fame speaks ! 

Why should she mourn ! 

Wide though the great Atlantic rows 

His huge waves, wi' their wild white pows, 

To part our auld an' new warld knowes, 

Weel pleased, she turns 
A westward look, where lustrous grows 

The name o' Burns ! 

Pride, too, though tear-diraraed for a wee, 

May lively light her heart wi' glee. 

For where, sin' winged earth first flew free, 

E'er lived the Ian' 
That bore so true a Bard as he — 

So true a Man ? 

In him poor human nature's heart 
Had ae firm friend to take its part. 
So weel kenn'd he wi' what fell art 

Our passions goad 
Frail man to slight fair virtue's chart, 

An' lose his road. 

An' we, whose lot's to toil, an' thole, 
Though cross an' care harass the soul, 
Can cheer the weary wai'k-day's dole 

Wi' strains heart-wrung. 
Brave strains ! our Burns, worn, but heart-whole, 

Alone has sung. 



TRIBUTES OF THE POETS. 133 

His words hae gi'en truth wings, to bear 
Round eartli the poor man's faith, that here 
Yain pride can ne'er wi' plain worth peer, 

Kor lift aught livin' 
Ae foot, though tip-tae raxed on gear. 

The nearer heaven. 



Fearless for right, wi' nerve to dare, 
Seer-like, he laid his sage soul bare, 
To show what life had graven there, 

That earth might learn ; — 
Yet, though a' earth in Burns may share. 

He's Scotia's bairn ! 



An' O ! how dearly has he row'd 
Her round wi' glory, like the gowd 
Her ain braw sunset pours on cloud, 

Crag, strath an' river. 
Till queen o' sang she stands, uncowed. 

An' crowned forever ! 

Whilst we within our heart's-heart shrine 
The man — " The brither man !" — entwine 
Wi' a' the loves o' auld-lang-syne ! 

An' young to-day, 
Scotland aiiu Burns ! — twa names to shine, 

While Time grows gray ! 

Scotland hersel' ! — wi' a' her glories, 
Her daurin' deeds an' dear auld stories ; 
The great an' guid wha've gane before us ; 

Her martyr host ; 
E'en wi' the graves o' them that bore ut^. 

The loved an' lost. 



134 BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION, 

Her sword, that aye flashed first for right ; 
Her word, that never craved to might ; 
Her sang, brought down like gleams o' light 

On music's wings, 
To nerve her in the lang fierce fight 

WV hostile kings. 

Her laverock, in the dawnin' clouds ; 
Her merle, amang the evenin' woods ; 
Her mavis, 'mang the birk's young buds ; 

The blythe wee wren, 
An' Robin's namesake, as he scuds 

Through drift- white glen. 

Her snawdrap, warslin' wi' the sleet ; 
Her primrose, pearled wi' dewy weet ; 
Her bluebell, frae its mountain seat 

Beckin' an' bowin', 
Her wee gem, sweetest o' the sweet, 

The peerless gowan. 

Her waters, in their sangsome glee, 
Gurglin' through clench and clover-lea, 
Soughin' aneath the saughen tree 

Where fishers hide, 
An' driftin' outward to the sea 

Wi' buirdl}^ pride. 

The catkins, that her hazels hing 

In clusters round the nooks o' spring ; 

Her rowan, an' her haws, that swing 

O'er wadeless streams, 
An' bless the school-boy hearts, that bring 

Them hame in dreams. 



TRIBUTES OF THE POETS. 135 

Her muirlan's, in their heather bloom ; 
Her deep glens, in their silent gloom ; 
Her gray crags, where their torrents fume 

Wi' downward shiver ; 
Her braesides, wi' their thistle plume. 

Free, an forever ! 

Scotland hersel' — Heaven bless her name, 
Wi' a' her kith an' kin the same — 
Yes ! Scotland's sel', wi' a' her fame, 

Weel's we revere her, 
Than him, her Bard o' heart an' hame. 

Is scarcely dearer ! 

So rare the sway, his heart-strains wield, 

In lordly ha' an' low thack bield, 

Wi' manhood, youth an' hoar-crowned eild, 

O'er Scotland wild. 
Burns an' The Word, frae Heaven revealed. 

Lie side by side. 

Earth owned ! his genius in its prime. 

Now towers in mind's fair green-hilled clime, 

Where, mist-robed, Ossian outsings time, 

An' Shakspeare smiles, 
As Milton, murmurin' dreams sublime, 

Looks earthward whiles ! 

O ! hear then, Scot ! — though yet you toil 
To fill some lordlin's loof wi' spoil. 
Or thriving on Columbian soil, 

Yoursel' your lord, 
Ne'er dim his now bright fame wi' guile 

In thought or word ! 



136 



BURNS CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. 



Spurn a' that's wrang, an' mak' the right 
Your haudfast sure, stieve strong an' tight, 
Cling there, an' ne'er let out o' sight 

The wants o' man. 
But, Burns-like, strive his lot to light 

As weel's you can. 

Ke'er let vile self get grip, to twist 
What heart or conscience dicta.tes just ; 
Straightforward aye act, though fate's gust 

May take your breath ; — 
The man wha fears nae face o' dust, 

IS^eeds scarce fear death. 

Proud, stern, though gentle as the tone 
Breathed through a mother's prayerfu' moan, 
Burns scorned to snool round rank or throne, 

Fause-tongued an' tame ; — 
Till death, his heart was freedom's own ; 

Be ours the same ! 



THE END. 



5K -3 1947 



*l^- 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



014 389 499 A 



